ABSTRACT
This chapter will help you discover what mergers and acquisitions are and what this book is about. We will explore the five types of mergers and a new 15-point taxonomy that will help you understand different types of acquisitions. As a reader, researcher, or consultant within organizational psychology or many other fields, you might not need to know the intricate financial or legal details about a merger or acquisition in terms of the complex structure of the way that operations, shares, stock, liabilities, or assets are transferred or sold. However, you do need to be aware that mergers and acquisitions are very complex organizational events and they are highly important to employees in the way that they feel, act, relate to each other, and so on. This chapter will also help you understand how this book is structured and what you will broadly discover in each chapter, starting with the history of mergers and acquisitions and the social, political, or economic trends that inspire them in Chapter 2, next. We aim for this book to be accessible to readers of all levels, from undergraduate or postgraduate students to university researchers, from psychologists to non-psychologists, from people working in consultancy to in-house human resource professionals or organizational development specialists, and from people highly familiar with mergers and acquisitions to readers with no prior experience in the field. This book is for any reader who is interested in learning more about the organizational psychology of mergers and acquisitions. We avoid using jargon or unnecessarily convoluted writing, and we hope that you will enjoy reading this book.
