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The authors investigate the pre-merger process, defined as the period between the announcement and completion of an M&A (mergers and acquisitions) deal. Specifically, the authors examine if the timing of the announcement in a merger wave affects whether or not the M&A deal is completed, and how long this pre-merger process takes. The authors conduct a textual analysis of the 150 largest abandoned M&A deals in the sample. From this, the authors find that competing bidders, regulatory concerns, and shareholder opposition from the acquirer are major roadblocks in the pre-merger process, and that these hurdles often occur jointly. Subsequently, the authors examine a sample of 2,802 announced M&As across four industry waves and find that M&A deals initiated earlier in a merger wave are more likely to be completed and are completed more speedily.

Building on social identity theory, the purpose of this paper is to present a study on the socio‐cultural integration process in a merger of two European pharmaceutical subsidiaries in Mexico. The paper investigates antecedents of perceived threat to pre‐merger identities in an officially claimed “merger‐of‐equals”.

A mixed‐methods approach was adopted comprising semi‐structured interviews (with 37 interview partners) and standardized employee surveys with 890 respondents.

Findings indicate that identity of the new organization was largely shared among members of the different subgroups. Though the employees considered their pre‐merger identities to be at stake (as demonstrated through the interviews), this experienced threat was not very strongly expressed in the survey. In fact, the sub‐groups were able to maintain distinctiveness, acknowledge the value added of each group, and had access to resources.

The main study limitation concerns the fact that this research was conducted using a cross‐sectional design. It would be interesting in future research to observe the processes as they unfold over time.

The paper's findings may help managers and change agents to understand that within merger partners, subgroups exist and different concerns in terms of their identity may emerge.

The results shed light on how shared identity in the new organization can successfully develop despite different perceptions of the integration process of members from the acquired and the acquiring groups. In contrast to past research findings on M&As, positive results were achieved despite contradictory perceptions of integration process of members of the acquired and the acquiring groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how and why a decision to merge two university hospitals in a public context might occur by using an in‐depth case study of the pre‐merger process of Karolinska University Hospital.

Based on extensive document analysis and 35 key informant interviews the paper reconstructed the pre‐merger process, searched for empirical patterns, and interpreted those by applying neo‐institutional theory.

Spanning nearly a decade, the pre‐merger process goes from idea generation through transition to decision, and took place on two arenas, political, and scientific. Both research excellence and economic efficiency are stated merger motives. By applying a neo‐institutional perspective, the paper finds that the two initial phases are driven by decision rationality, which is typical for political organizations and that the final phase demonstrated action rationality, which is typical for private firms. Critical factors behind this radical change of decision logic are means convergence, uniting key stakeholder groups, and an economic and political crisis, triggering critical incidents, which ultimately legitimized the formal decision. It is evident from the paper that merger decisions in the public sector might not necessarily result from stated and/or economic drivers only.

This paper suggests that a change of decision logic from decision to action rationality might promote effective decision making on large and complex issues in a public context.

This is the first systematic in‐depth study of a university hospital merger employing a decision‐making perspective.

In the context of the conflicting results of earlier studies, this chapter proposes a model of pre-merger identification and commitment to merger (in a pre-merger setting) by taking into account the multi-dimensional nature of commitment. First it argues that commitment to merger, rather than commitment to organization, drives behaviour in a merger. Then pre-merger identification is hypothesized to be positively related to normative and continuance commitment and either negatively or not significantly related to affective commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to study more deeply the use of performance information (PI) in the context of the administrative-territorial reform, e.g. amalgamation in the local governments (LG) with an example of Estonian LGs.

The case study method is adopted, using data from publicly available documents and interviews with the politicians and officials at the five merger cases of Estonian LG units. The data are interpreted and analysed using attribution theory.

The results show that amalgamation patterns do have an influence on PI use – in particular, the authors see that PI is reported to be used more frequently in cases of voluntary mergers, which may be related to the different motivations to make attributions in cases of voluntary and compulsory mergers.

The study contributes to the debate on the importance and usefulness of different types of PI, as financial as well as non-financial information and for different information users in the light of LG reform in Estonia as being a Central and Eastern European country.

The multiple organizational factors impacting upon a merger as well as those processes being impacted upon throughout the merger process will be examined. Part 1 of this article examined corporate culture and its affects on employees when two companies merge and considered the importance of lucid communication throughout the process. Part 2 of the article addresses the critical issue of stress, which is an outcome within the new and uncertain environment. Finally, the article concludes with the process of managing and strategy throughout the phases, giving guidelines that managers and CEOs should follow in the event of an M&A. Furthermore, the five major sections (communications, corporate culture, change, stress, and managing/strategy) are sub‐divided into three sub‐sections: pre‐merger; during the merger; post‐merger. This is intended to further assist managers and CEOs distinguish the important issues facing employees at each of the three junctures of the M&A process.

The purpose of this paper is to advance cross‐cultural management during mergers and acquisitions (M&A), an issue that remains poorly understood despite a large body of literature accumulated over many years of study and experience.

Based on literature review and case studies of both successful and unsuccessful companies, this paper clarifies the concept, the assessment and the use of corporate culture and its dimensions during all mergers and acquisitions stages, and as such shows its role as an important and influential milestone in the international business environment exploration.

The paper arrives at the conclusion that the enduring paradox of the high rate of M&A failure vs the growing activity of M&A may be due to lack of synchronized activities of all merger stages.

The paper presents frameworks and managerial tools that can help researchers and practitioners conduct better corporate culture assessment during all stages of the M&A, including screening, planning, and negotiation, and enhance the effectiveness of interventions carried out during post‐merger integration process.

The paper offers insights into corporate culture and its impact during pre‐merger stage, negotiation, and the post‐merger integration process.

The aim of this paper is to describe and qualitatively explain certain observations concerning corporate social responsibility from the personnel standpoint with special reference to various stakeholders.

The observations were made in connection with earlier studies on organizational change. The paper draws on stakeholder thinking and offers a view regarding the way employees perceive business issues concerning CSR in relation to corporate stakeholder groups. Should a business give priority to the interests of its owners or take all stakeholder groups equally into account? How do employees see their own relations with other stakeholder groups, and do their views change in the course of a post‐merger integration process? The interviews were conducted at two points in the change process in Nordic energy sector companies: first in the pre‐merger situation in 2001 and then in the post‐merger situation four years later in 2005.

The main contribution of the study is the observation of the changing positions of stakeholder groups in a merger process. The findings show that two of these primary stakeholder groups – namely, management and owners – shift places in a merger, with owners replacing the management in the corporate core and the old, pre‐merger management joining the stakeholder group of other personnel.

The paper produces new and validated scientific information about energy‐sector mergers from the employees' point‐of‐view.

The purpose of this research paper is to clarify why shareholders should be prudent when managers promise value gains from a synergetic merger.

The paper proposes a simple two‐state model of stochastic firm cash flows which allows for a discussion of wealth redistribution in conglomerate mergers, both under perfect information and moral hazard.

It is found that shareholders regularly lose in non‐synergetic mergers, and will not necessarily gain if synergies are positive. In the model, a corresponding critical level of synergies is calculated explicitly. It is shown that there are also new value effects induced by moral hazard, which constitute genuine financial synergies of their own.

The positive synergies are due to the mitigation of asset substitution problems after the merger, and they are an interesting question for generalization in future research.

As one of its practical implications, the findings suggest that managers should provide shareholders with concrete ideas of where promised synergies might come from, and why there should exist any bargaining range for equilibrium exchange ratios which leaves all shareholders better off.

The paper shows that these questions can be answered on a rigorous basis which might improve the pre‐merger decision process between managers, shareholders and the affected groups of stakeholders, respectively.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are important strategic actions undertaken by firms to access resources and markets. However, firms face substantial challenges in M&As during deal completion. While prior literature reviews synthesize the studies on the post-merger consequences of M&As, the literature on deal completion is largely fragmented. In this paper, the authors synthesize prior literature on deal completion into the antecedents and consequences framework and map various studies across the international business and management, finance and accounting literature at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels.

The authors adopt a content analysis-based methodology to conduct the review. First, the authors identify existing literature on deal completion based on keyword searches. Next, the authors propose a framework that integrates the extant literature from a multi-theoretic perspective across four broad themes: concepts, antecedents, implications and moderators. In this study, the authors consider not only empirical but also conceptual papers to strengthen the theoretical foundations of M&A literature. Finally, after synthesizing various studies, the authors highlight a future research agenda on deal completion.

Based on the review, this study provides important avenues for future research on M&A deal completion.

This study theoretically integrates multi-disciplinary and multi-country research on acquisition completion.