Employees’ responses to an organizational merger: Intraindividual change in organizational identification, attachment, and turnover.

Abstract

The authors used pre-post merger data from 599 employees experiencing a major corporate merger to compare 3 conceptual models based on the logic of social identity theory (SIT) and exchange theory to explain employees' merger responses. At issue is how perceived change in employees' own jobs and roles (i.e., personal valence) and perceived change in their organization's status and merger appropriateness (i.e., organizational valence) affect their changing organizational identification, attachment attitudes, and voluntary turnover. The first model suggests that organizational identification and organizational attachment develop independently and have distinct antecedents. The second model posits that organizational identification mediates the relationships between change in organizational and personal valence and change in attachment and turnover. The third model posits that change in personal valence moderates the relationship between changes in organizational valence and in organizational identification and attachment. Using latent difference score (LDS) modeling in an SEM framework and survival analysis, the results suggest an emergent fourth model that integrates the first and second models: Although change in organizational identification during the merger mediates the relationship between change in personal status and organizational valence and change in attachment, there is a direct and unmediated relationship between change in personal valence and attachment. This integrated model has implications for M&A theory and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

The career-horizon problem in capital investments for lone-founder and long-tenure acquirer CEOs in their final career stage

“…However, there is also another approach (e.g. Boivie et al, 2011;Sung et al, 2017;Ullrich et al, 2005, for examples on mergers) that uses qualitative methods or surveys to measure social identification. Future research should therefore seek to complement our results by measuring organizational identification directly using qualitative or mixed methods to obtain a more fine-grained analysis.…”

Managing patterns of internationalization, integration, and identity transformation: The post-acquisition metamorphosis of an Arabian Gulf EMNC

“…As organizational identity is key to understanding strategic change (Ravasi & Phillips, 2011), decision making (Gioia & Thomas, 1996;Riantoputra, 2010), and organizational practices (Clark & Geppert, 2011), acquisitions have been increasingly recognized as trigger events for identity change at both the individual and organizational level of analysis (Giessner, Horton & Humborstad, 2016;Lupina-Wegener, Schneider & van Dick, 2015). Identity issues in acquisitions have received substantial attention, with scholars mainly focusing on individual identification following an acquisition (Spoor & Chu, 2017;Sung et al, 2017;Ullrich et al, 2005;van Dick et al, 2006;van Knippenberg et al, 2006), occupational identification (Kroon & Noorderhaven, 2018), or leaders' identity work (Xing & Liu, 2016). We concentrate on the firm level, at which organizational identity issues are expected to affect both the acquisition and integration processes.…”

Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions: Bringing Together Type of Diversification, Synergy Potential and Cultural Distance

“…To cope up to the business needs of growth and profitability and get the advantage of economies of scale, firms are increasingly entering new territories and industries by mergers and acquisitions (Graebner et al, 2017; Kroon & Noorderhaven, 2018). Despite their increasing frequency, studies have shown that mergers and acquisitions are not able to obtain the desired results (Sung et al, 2017).…”

“…Indeed, employee resistance appears to be a major factor in the overall success of this strategic move. The purpose of this paper, three part, is to provide a thorough overview of the forces at play in employee resistance to change, its influence on the M&A’s success, and the ways to address such resistance (van Dijk & van Dick, 2009), cultural factors (Pablo, 1994; Stahl & Voigt, 2008; Weber et al, 1996), organisational identification (Kroon & Noorderhaven, 2018), lack of communication (Appelbaum et al, 2017; Zagelmeyer et al, 2018), problem in the integration phase (Calipha et al, 2010), job insecurity among employees (Sung et al, 2017) and a lot more. Despite all these efforts to pinpoint the root causes of failure and suggestion of ways to improve the same, the exact factors that might predict the success or failure of a merger or an acquisition remain unclear.…”