Speed of acquisition integration: Separating the role of human and task integration

Organisational Resilience in Acquisition Integration—Organisational Antecedents and Contingency Effects of Flexibility and Redundancy

“…Flexibility relates to an ability to adjust interdependencies and respond to disruptive events (Sanchez, ; Shin, Taylor, & Seo, ; Wright & Snell, ) that may be associated with greater consultation in decision making (Ammeter, Douglas, Gardner, Hochwarter, & Ferris, ). At an individual level, resilience has been associated to risk‐taking, in turn a driver of an ability to find novel connections or entrepreneurial behaviour (Jenkins, Wiklund, & Brundin, ; Kossek & Perrigino, ) and acquisition integration (Bauer, King, & Matzler, ).…”

“…For instance, slack resources, such as more middle managers involved in integration induces costs (Bourgeois, ), and excessive flexibility can lead to overreacting to minor internal or external changes to cause delays (Sirower, ). These circumstances can contribute to employee uncertainty and resistance that is associated with lower acquisition performance (Bauer et al, ). Moreover, relations between flexibility and redundancy may be complex.…”

Contextualizing speed and cross-border acquisition performance: Labor market flexibility and efficiency effects

“…These separate constructs relate to different decisions that often involve trade-offs where progress on one dimension can come at the expense of the other (Haspeslagh & Jemison, 1991). Further, adjusting speed of human and task integration separately has been found to positively influence acquisition performance (Bauer, King, & Matzler, 2016;Birkinshaw et al, 2000;Schweizer, 2005;Gates & Very, 2003). The combined implication from acquisition research is that managing integration and its speed is an important, but an insufficient condition for improving acquisition performance.…”

“…If the target is granted autonomy, then 12 months would be rather slow when compared to a firm fully integrating a target in 12 months. To make the firm acquisition integration comparable, we applied a relative measure (Carbonell, Rodriguez-Escudero & Pujari, 2009) for speed of integration as suggested by Bauer, King and Matzler (2016). Relative approaches are rather new in acquisition research, but they are common in new product development literature (e.g., Goktan & Miles, 2011;Akgün & Lynn, 2002;Kessler & Bierly, 2002).…”

“…As the duration of integration could significantly vary for different functions, we assessed the duration of integration with the same items as the degree of functional changes. Based on the degree of change and the duration of integration, we compounded the relative measure of speed (Alpha: .722) as suggested by Bauer, King & Matzler (2016). Labor market flexibility is assessed by five indicators, namely the cooperation in labor-employer relationships, the flexibility of wage determination, hiring and firing practices, redundancy costs and weeks of salary, and the effect of taxation on incentives to work.…”