preview

Mergers And Acquisitions ( M & S

Better Essays

Introduction Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are an established form of expansion for medium to large size companies, with the intention of creating more value by for example increasing competitiveness and transferring technology and innovation. In other words, it is assumed that “the combined company will have greater value than the two companies alone” (Marks & Mirvis, 1992, p. 69), It can even be argued that, with the globalization of business, M&As are needed to keep up (Hitt, Franklin & Zhu, 2006). Unfortunately, the failure rate in M&As is extremely high with 70% of worldwide M&A failing to increase stakeholder value (Mohibullah, 2009) and over 90% of European M&A failing to reach financial objectives (Hay Group. 2007). Although there may be many different reasons for an M&A not succeeding, failure is most often attributed to the incompatibility of the two (corporate) cultures (Uljin, Duyster & Fevre, 2010). In the last couple of decades, M&A has switched from being mostly a domestic phenomenon to an international phenomenon, initially caused by the integration of the European Union in the 90s, followed by a rise in “the international expansion of emerging market multinationals … be it by Chinese or Indian firms” (Reynolds & Teerikangas, 2016, p. 42), adding a new dimension to the cultural differences; national cultures. Consequently, with this rise in the number of cross-border M&A also came an increased interest in the effect of national cultural differences between

Get Access