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Skillful management of employees after a merger or acquisition (M&A) is one of the key aspects to ensuring a successful deal, and most notably to ensure talent retention. This paper aims to describe how Bristol Myer Squibb (BMS) efficiently integrated Celgene after it bought the company for a near-record $74bn in 2019. The authors explain the structural elements applied during the premerger phase (acquisition experience, partner location and portfolio alignment) and the subsequent postmerger decisions to ensure rapid integration (choice of the leadership team, cultural integration and the communication strategy).

This paper adopts a single-case approach of the second largest acquisition in the pharmaceutical industry. It analyzes the management and talent retention decisions taken to ensure rapid integration of Celgene while ensuring that employees felt engaged in the process. This was achieved despite the consideration challenges posed by the COVID-19 global lockdown.

M&As are well known for the HR challenges they generate such as change management, cultural clashes and increased employee turnover. This paper demonstrates how BMS was able to overcome these hurdles, combining a fast speed of integration with managerial dexterity.

This paper offers a concise and clear outline of the management strategies used by BMS to ensure a successful integration strategy. This approach included a strong respect for the human as well as financial and strategic aspects of the deal. For even greater clarity, this paper offers a diagrammatic representation of the strategy of BMS to improve the speed of integration.

While existing literature extensively explores manufacturing firms expanding into services, little is known about the modes of servitisation, the means by which they carry it out. This paper concentrates on acquisitions as a mode of servitisation. Post-acquisition integration is when the potential of an acquisition is realised. The paper therefore aims to categorise types of integrations following the acquisition of servitised firms and discusses their consequences for servitisation.

The empirical part of the paper is based on two case studies, each involving the acquisition of servitised firms. Both acquirers changed their integration approach over time.

The paper conceptualises three types of integrations: rhetorical, insulated and transformative integrations, indicating whether and how the acquirer becomes servitised following the integration. These highlight the analysis of integration based on business models and customer orientation in relation to servitisation.

This paper contributes to research on servitisation by emphasising acquisitions as a mode of servitisation and conceptualising three integration types related to business models and customer orientations. Furthermore, the paper highlights how an acquirer's servitisation leads to new offerings targeting new customers, as opposed to strengthening existing relationships.

This study describes how a multinational enterprise (MNE) gains acceptance after rebranding acquired brands from different countries among its internal and external stakeholders and identifies factors that influence this process.

The study employed a single case-study approach, including 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with employees of a firm involved in the rebranding process in six countries. The countries are Sweden, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

The findings reveal how the MNE integrated brands it acquired in different international markets into one overarching corporate brand. The study shows that in emerging countries, external legitimation (external implementation process, country profiles and customer buy-in) constitutes the most significant challenge. By contrast, in developed countries, internal legitimation (employee buy-in and internal implementation process) is more challenging.

The study contributes to and extends the rebranding literature by using a legitimation lens to analyze the rebranding process. This lens shows how internal and external stakeholders are both crucial to successful rebranding. The study provides a comprehensive perspective of the process, identifies challenging factors and differentiates between their importance in emerging and developed countries.

To address the dearth of research on how firms legitimize a new brand in different national contexts, the study compares the rebranding process in multiple countries and discusses the factors influencing the rebranding process.

This study investigates the relationship between CEO power and the risk profile (RP) of acquiring banks through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions.

The analysis is based on 214 transactions between 2010 and 2022 involving European Union-based acquirers. To assess the impact of M&A on the acquiring bank’s RP, we compare changes in the acquirer’s RP to control banks. We use linear regression with two-stage least squares instrumental variables (2SLS-IV) to examine the effect of CEO power on changes in merger-related risk.

The findings suggest that CEO power reduces the RP of the acquiring bank. Specifically, CEOs who hold both the CEO and board chair positions tend to take fewer risks. Additionally, CEOs with high ownership, CEO pay and extensive experience (measured by tenure and acquisition experience) decrease the RP. However, prestige power is positively correlated with an increase in RPs.

This research examines CEO influence on bank risk post-mergers, providing insights into governance, risk and strategic choices. The findings can guide banks in CEO selection and governance to mitigate M&A risks, improving risk management and decision-making in the financial sector.

This study is the first empirical investigation introducing diverse executive power metrics to analyze the link between executive power and risk-taking in the European banking sector, with a specific emphasis on the impact on M&A as critical investment choices.

This study advances research on cognitive diversity from the perspective of public employees by studying the effect of cognitive diversity on team viability, the mediating effect of transactive memory systems (TMS) and the moderating effect of technology integration.

We used SmartPLS to analyze a unique data set from 193 public employees. The information was collected through an online questionnaire administered by the LimeSurvey Professional platform. In addition to analyzing the data through partial least squares structural equation modeling with higher-order latent variables, we analyzed mediating and moderating effects.

The results show that TMS act as partial mediators between cognitive diversity and team viability. Although technology integration (for both external diffusion and internal integration) moderates this relationship to mitigate negative effects, technological infrastructure does not.

This study expands previous research on TMS and technology integration. Our findings support the significance of TMS and technology integration in a context of cognitive diversity, identify ways to develop good management behavior and assess the results of these practices for team viability. We recommend that public managers in contexts of cognitive diversity work to create effective workplace environments. Training programs can foster TMS capabilities and support implementation of technology integration to improve team viability and results for public service delivery to citizens.

This article aims to trace the historical development of the behavioral strategy (BS) field, which implements psychology in strategic management. Mainly, it provides a contextual understanding of how this stream of research has historically evolved and what relevant future trajectories are. This work is part of the “over half a century of Management Decision” celebrative and informal Journal section.

We consider BS literature produced in management decision (MD), the oldest and longest-running scholarly publication in management, as a proxy for the evolution of management thought. Through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process, we collected – via the MD website and Scopus – a sample of 97 BS articles published in MD from its foundation (1967) until today (2024). Regarding the analysis, we adopted a Reflexive Thematic Analysis approach to synthesize the main BS topics, then read from a historical perspective regarding three “eras” over which the literature developed. Selected international literature outside the Journal’s boundaries was considered to complement this historical analysis.

Historically, within the BS field, the interest passed from the rules to rationally govern strategic decision-making processes, to studying what causes cognitive errors, to understanding how to avoid biases and to being prepared for dramatic changes. The article also identifies six future research trajectories, namely “positive heuristics,” “context-embedded mental processes,” “non-conventional thinking,” “cognitive evolutionary triggers,” “debiasing strategies” and “behavioral theories for new strategic challenges” that future research could investigate.

The limitation of the study lies in its exclusive focus on MD for investigating the historical evolution of BS, thereby overlooking critical contributions from other journals. Therefore, MD’s editorial preferences have influenced results. A comprehensive SLR on the BS field is still needed, requiring broader journal coverage to mitigate selection biases and enhance field appraisal.

This contribution is the first to offer a historical evolutionary view of the BS field, complementing the few other reviews on this stream of research. This fills a gap in the study of the evolution of management thought.