Scholars from multiple fields have shown increasing interest in the causes and consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Although this proliferation of research has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of M&A activity, absent is the necessary step of consolidating and integrating extant knowledge. Accordingly, this article develops a framework to organize and review recent empirical findings, principally from management, economics, and finance in which interest in acquisition behavior is high but also from other areas that have tangentially explored acquisition activity such as accounting and sociology. This article identifies patterns and theoretical gaps and provides recommendations for future research aimed at developing a more integrated M&A research agenda for management scientists.

This study investigated coordinated action in multiteam systems employing 233 correspondent systems, comprising 3 highly specialized 6-person teams, that were engaged in an exercise that was simultaneously "laboratory-like" and "field-like." It enriches multiteam system theory through the combination of theoretical perspectives from the team and the large organization literatures, underscores the differential impact of large size and modular organization by specialization, and demonstrates that conventional wisdom regarding effective coordination in traditional teams and large organizations does not always transfer to multiteam systems. We empirically show that coordination enacted across team boundaries at the component team level can be detrimental to performance and that coordinated actions enacted by component team boundary spanners and system leadership positively impact system performance only when these actions are centered around the component team most critical to addressing the demands of the task environment.

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A significant body of research has described effective leader behaviours and has connected these behaviours to positive employee outcomes. However, this research has yet to be systematically integrated with organizational justice research to describe how leader behaviours inform justice perceptions. Therefore, we conduct a meta‐analysis (k = 166, N = 46,034) to investigate how three types of leader behaviours (task, relational, and change) inform four dimensions of organizational justice (procedural, distributive, interpersonal, and informational) referenced to the leader and to the organization. Further, we examine the joint impact of leader behaviours and justice perceptions on social exchange quality (i.e., leader–member exchange), task performance, and job satisfaction. Our results suggest that leader behaviours differentially inform leader‐ and organization‐focused justice perceptions, and the joint effect of leader behaviours and justice perceptions offer more nuanced explanations for outcomes.

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Justice research examining gender differences has yielded contrasting findings. This study enlists advanced techniques in cognitive neuroscience (fMRI) to examine gender differences in brain activation patterns in response to procedural and distributive justice manipulations. We integrate social role, information processing, justice, and neuroscience literature to posit and test for gender differences in 2 neural subsystems known to be involved in the appraisal of self-relevant events. Results indicate that the relationship between justice information processing and neural activity in areas representing these subsystems is significantly influenced by gender, with greater activation for females than males during consideration of both procedural and distributive justice information. In addition, we find evidence that gender and distributive injustice interact to influence bargaining behavior, with females rejecting ultimatum game offers more frequently than males. Results also demonstrate activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and ventral striatum brain regions during procedural justice evaluation is associated with offer rejection in females, but not in males. Managerial implications based on the study's support for gender differences in justice perceptions are discussed.

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We report a within-teams experiment testing the effects of fit between team structure and regulatory task demands on task performance and satisfaction through average team member positive affect and helping behaviors. We used a completely crossed repeated-observations design in which 21 teams enacted 2 tasks with different regulatory focus characteristics (prevention and promotion) in 2 organizational structures (functional and divisional), resulting in 84 observations. Results suggested that salient regulatory demands inherent in the task interacted with structure to determine objective and subjective team-level outcomes, such that functional structures were best suited to (i.e., had best fit with) tasks with a prevention regulatory focus and divisional structures were best suited to tasks with a promotion regulatory focus. This contingency finding integrates regulatory focus and structural contingency theories, and extends them to the team level with implications for models of performance, satisfaction, and team dynamics.