Despite the relentless growth of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As), prior research revealed that nearly half of all acquisitions failed (Young, 1981; Porter, 1987; Hunt and Downing, 1990; Devine, 2003, p. 30; and Cartwright and Schoenberg, 2006). This high failure rate has received considerable attention from the finance and strategic management scholars. Recently, scholars have started looking at the organizational and the human resource-related factors to explain the acquisition performance. This literature, with its diverse origins in organizational science, anthropology, sociology and psychology, had sought to explain how the organizational factors, integration process and employees’ psychological and behavioral reactions affect the M&A outcome (Brahma, 2011). Although a wealth of knowledge has been accumulated, researchers criticized many of these studies for being anecdotal, unrelated to theory, marginally informative, unsystematic and fragmented (Napier, 1989; and Larsson and Finkelstein, 1999). Therefore, an attempt is made to integrate the organizational and human resource perspectives to explain how these factors affect acquisition outcome.
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