ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the 1990s, organizational mergers have been implemented throughout the world with the aim of improving organizations’ effectiveness and competitiveness in the global economy (Daly, Pouder, & Kabanoff, 2004). Most organizational changes create stress and job insecurity, but organizational mergers represent a particularly stressful kind of change, given the large-scale nature of this change, as well as the fact that employees must relinquish an identity that was previously important to them (their premerger organization) and shift their allegiance to the newly merged organization (Cartwright & Cooper, 1992; Nadler & Tushman, 1989). To account for the fact that between 60% and 70% of mergers fail to achieve their economic aims (Devoge & Shiraki, 2000; Gunders & Alpert, 2001; KPMG, 2001), commentators have proposed that relying on a strictly economical point of view is unlikely to provide insights into why mergers so often fail. In fact, some researchers have proposed that there is much unexplained variance in predicting why mergers fail or succeed (Hitt, Ireland, & Harrison, 2001), and that human factors need to be taken into consideration to understand what goes on during organizational mergers (Cartwright & Cooper, 1992).
