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While earlier acquisition research often focused on either the acquirer or the target side of analysis, recent work has increasingly emphasized the need to understand the dyadic interrelationship between the target and the acquirer. This review aims at synthesizing research progress in the area of target–acquirer interrelationships and understanding what questions remain unanswered. The author organizes this review into three dimensions of target–acquirer interrelationship: (a) their relative attributes (what both parties are relative to each other), (b) their connections (what both parties have with each other), and (c) their interactions (what both parties do to each other). Based on the review, the author then identifies critical research gaps and opportunities for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelationship between the target and the acquirer in acquisitions.

This paper aims to evaluate the robustness of the listing effect in Australia, that is whether acquisitions of private firms create more value to the bidding firm’s shareholders than acquisitions of publicly listed firms.

The authors analyze the market reaction to the announcement of takeover bids initiated by Australian public firms on private and public targets over the period 1990-2011. The analysis controls for a wide range of bidder, deal and target country characteristics that are likely to correlate with the target’s listing status and acquirer abnormal returns. The authors also use a selection model to address the endogenous choice of the target’s listing status.

The results indicate that bidders experience significantly higher abnormal returns of about 1.7 per cent in the 11-day event window when the target is a private firm. The authors show that this result is broad-based and persistent. It does not appear to depend on whether the target is small or large; whether it is related or unrelated to the bidder’s industry; whether it is in the resources sector; and whether the transaction is domestic or cross-border. They find some evidence that bidder returns might be stronger for larger acquisitions, for unrelated targets, and in poor market conditions such as in the wake of the recent global financial crisis.

The research would benefit from the inclusion of the bidding firm’s ownership and governance characteristics.

The results support the view that market frictions contribute to make private firms attractive targets.

The analysis confirms the pervasiveness of the listing effect in a market characterized by a lesser degree of competition, higher search costs and the significance of the natural resources sector.

The success of mergers and acquisitions are contingent upon organizational operations, legal structures, and fiscal responsibilities. Each of these areas requires a proper mix of human capital – people – assigned to carry out the objectives and goals of the emerging entity. Within the general knowledge of Mergers and acquisitions (M&As), research focusing upon these aspects of human capital have been lacking. This chapter adds to the current knowledge of M&A human resources by establishing a framework that can direct future research.

This paper examines how differences in management styles impact the performance of cross-border acquisitions. Two principal findings are reported. First, the study focuses on the individual dimensions of management style and highlights the particular influence that differences in risk orientation exert on acquisition outcome. This result, although unexpected, is argued to be consistent with prior literature that places risk orientation in a central role within organisational behaviour. Second, the relationship between management style compatibility and cross-border acquisition performance is found to be contingent upon the level of organisational interaction imposed by the post-acquisition process. Implications are drawn for both researchers and practitioners.

While emotions and feelings arise in the singular personality, they may also develop a normative dimensionality in a plural agency. The authors identify the cybernetic systemic principles of how emotions might be normatively regulated and affect plural agency performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a generic cultural socio-cognitive trait theory of plural affective agency (the emotional organization), involving interactive cognitive and affective traits, and these play a role within the contexts of Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A).

The authors integrate James Gross’ model of emotion regulation with the earlier work on normative personality in the context of Mindset Agency Theory. The agency is a socio-cognitive entity with attitude, and operates through traits that control thinking and decision making. These traits are epistemically independent and operate on a bipolar scale; with the alternate poles having an auxiliary function to each other – where the traits may take intermediary “balanced” states between the poles.

Processes of affect regulation are supposed to go through three stages: first, identification (affective situation awareness); second, elaboration of affect is constituted through schemas of emotional feeling, which include emotion ideologies generating emotional responses to distinct contextual situations; third, execution: in the operative system primary emotions are assessed through operative intelligence for any adaptive information and the capacity to organize action; and turned into action, i.e. responses, through cultural feeling rules and socio-cultural display rules, conforming to emotion ideologies.

This new theory provides guidance for framing multilevel interaction where smaller collectives (as social systems) are embedded into larger social systems with a culture, an emotional climate and institutions. Thus, it is providing a generic theoretical frame for M & A analyses, where a smaller social unit (the acquired) is to be integrated into a larger social unit (the acquirer).

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion regulation is a prerequisite of managerial intelligence, which is at demand during M & A processes. While managerial intelligence may be grossly defined as the capacity of management to find an appropriate and fruitful balance between action and learning orientation of an organization, its affective equivalent is the capacity of management to find a fruitful balance between established emotion expression and learning alternate forms of emotion expression.

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion is a prerequisite of social, cultural and emotional intelligence. The provided theory can be easily linked with empirical work on the emergence of a cultural climate of fear within societies. Thus, “Affective Agency Theory” also has a bearing for political systems’ analysis, what, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper builds on the recently developed Mindset Agency Theory, elaborating it through the introduction of the dimension of affect, where cognitive and affective traits interact and become responsible for patterns of behaviour. The model is providing a framework which links emotion expression and emotion regulation with cognitive analysis.

Individual interactions between partners are recognized today as playing a central role in the evolution of cooperative interorganizational relationships. Most theoretical treatments of interactions have been made at a macro-level, with reference to constructs such as trust, outcome expectations, process and outcome discrepancies, and communication. Relationships are analyzed at the level of organizations seen as collective actors, and their international aspects are reduced to the comparative analysis of macro-level dimensions of culture. In the past two decades, research in social science has progressively revealed the complex and multiple natures of culture and identity in organizations. Surprisingly, the monolithic vision of organizational and national cultures is still dominant in the strategy field and has tended to use organization-wide or nationwide classifications (one organization – one culture/one country – one culture) and seeing top managers as the most reliable source of information on the topic. The paper suggests substantial modifications in our approach to culture and argues that the mapping and codifying of different management styles and cultural dimensions may not be enough to understand the dynamics of international business encounters. The main issue is not the existence of differences per se, but rather the way behavioral differences are perceived and interpreted by members of other managerial/organizational/national cultures, and particularly how the interactions – the “contact” across these cultures – are socially constructed and managed. We propose a research agenda putting perceptions and communication processes at center stage and introduce the concepts of Communication and Cultural Dissonance – rooted in the field of cross-cultural management and intercultural communication – as an important factor in the development of cooperative processes. Perceptions of cultural differences and problematic behaviors are grounded in the different cultural interpretations of a proper way to communicate intent, relations and business strategies to be implemented. These respective and often divergent interpretations will be fundamental in the way individuals assess the quality of the cooperation process, the reliability of their partners and of the knowledge they want to transfer and the trustworthiness of the partner. We use data from a longitudinal study of several post-merger integration processes to illustrate some of our theoretical conjectures.

The rapid growth of digitalization is being used for the betterment of the banking and financial services sector and many other industries. Digital banking (DB) is transforming traditional banking activities into a digital environment. The benefits and conveniences that DB bring to consumers and financial institutions (FIs) have led FIs to adopt various DB innovations. However, to determine whether the demand for DB is at a healthy level, it is necessary to evaluate how DB innovations are accepted among consumers. This chapter is a “viewpoint” of the author that reviews the background of DB in Sri Lanka (SL) and evaluates the success of its diffusion.

The status of the DB diffusion in SL is discussed under DB ecosystem, and DB customer adoption. The DB ecosystem is discussed through the topics of the country’s digital infrastructure (DI), technological know-how within the banks, technology adoption of the market vendors, and consumer’s digital literacy. Then, the consumer use of the DB services is evaluated using the transactions that happened through DB systems against paper-based payments. Statistics presented by Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) are used as secondary data for the study.

According to the findings of this report, consumer DB adaption is still in its infancy compared to the development of the country’s DB ecosystem. Considering the causes that drives consumer innovation decisions, this chapter highlights the need for industry practitioners to revisit their DB marketing strategies based on consumers’ culture and innovativeness. To that end, further studies are necessary on how individuals’ culture influences DB adoption.

Using a proprietary database of telecommunications projects in emerging markets, we investigate key location characteristics of private infrastructure projects in Latin America and Asia. We identify economic, institutional, sectoral, and cultural variables that influence project structure, and compare these environmental and structural characteristics between and within our focal regions. We find that investment projects in Latin America and Asia differ along a number of dimensions and that countries that are successful in attracting projects within regions demonstrate distinct environmental features that appear to draw that investment. We suggest that a contingency perspective is useful for understanding how different regions and countries offer advantages in some areas to compensate for liabilities in others.

This paper explores the impact of national culture on the performance of the foreign affiliates in Greece, a country which belongs to the economic periphery of the European Union. Greece is characterised by low internationalisation and competitiveness, and has been clustered by Hofstede in the Mediterranean culture managing directorial model. This paper, using a sample of 478 firms, examines the extent to which the national culture factor has affected the performance of foreign affiliates in Greece. It verifies the first hypothesis that the higher the national culture distance between the country of origin of the foreign firm from Greece the better the performance of the Greek affiliate. The findings also support the second hypothesis that the higher the score on the individualism dimension of the foreign firm the higher the performance of its affiliate in a collectivistic society.

The purpose of this paper is to classify the source countries of inward foreign direct investments (FDIs) to Turkey and to Germany as individual samples of developing and developed economies, to produce practical information to target company managers and owners that they can use for having much more investments or getting more bargaining power with the existing or potential investors.

Cluster analysis methodology with Ward’s (1963) technique is used to create significant groups out of FDI source countries.

The results show that foreign direct investors – labeled by their country of origin – investing in Turkey are grouped into two main clusters. First main cluster of Turkey has three sub-clusters. Investors investing in Germany are also grouped into two main clusters. First main cluster of Germany has two sub-clusters. Of all seven clustering criteria, four of them were prominent in grouping, which are: having a high equity ownership in the investment, investing in companies with high market capitalization, investing in companies with high/low financial risk and high/low financial performance, and investing in young companies. Furthermore, investors from same origin behave differently in Turkey and Germany. They adjust their attitude toward risk when the host country changes. Lastly, source countries in the sample that have a minimum distance in between, are the ones sharing similar cultural values.

The limitations of the study are the small number of observation with complete and standard company data needed, especially in Turkey, and the compelled shortness of time period for the empirical analysis. Some suggestions were offered for future researches to contribute to the topic by using bigger samples; by making variations in country, time, or industry; by relating country factors to social/entrepreneurial factors; and by supporting the research with qualitative techniques.

This paper constitutes a contribution to the empirical field research in Turkey, an emerging country with very limited firm-level financial and ownership data, compared to Germany, a developed country with relatively more data availability.