ABSTRACT
Internal stakeholders such as employees are, more or less by definition, at the core of the firm. Reflecting the multiplicity of internal stakes, this chapter focuses on the internal stakeholders of target firms. The significance of employee-related issues in mergers and acquisitions has been emphasised for at least a couple of decades (Buono and Bowditch 1989). Several researchers blame failed mergers and acquisitions on poor integration and lack of respect for the human values of the target firm (for example, Schweiger and DeNisi 1991; Shrivastava 1986). Usually, the literature sketches a dichotomy where management is contrasted with employees, understood as a relatively uniform collective that needs to be treated gently in order to avoid discontent. Very often, these studies take a managerial stance, focusing on managerial activities said to facilitate or complicate the integration of an acquired firm (see, for example, Haspeslagh and Jemison 1991; Olie 1994). Relatively few studies target employees more directly (with some notable exceptions, like Lohrum 1996; Risberg 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003; Søderberg 2003, 2006). For this reason, employee perceptions and ideas concerning the consequences of mergers and acquisitions are rarely described from an internal company perspective. Even rarer are challenges to the assumption that employees are a uniform group with common interests, an assumption that stakeholder theory has seriously questioned (Freeman 1984).
