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1 Introduction
One of the largest challenges for organizations today is how to cope with change. Change has become an on-going topic for management practitioners and, for many organizations, coping with change processes successfully, has become a matter of survival. But if we look at empirical studies evaluating the success of change programmes, the findings are deflating. According to [14] Burnes (2005), more than 80 per cent of the change initiatives do not reach expectations.
Merger and acquisitions (M&As) and the following post-merger integration (PMI) process represent one of the most fundamental forms of change which an organization can experience. They often involve major changes in the business strategy and objectives, the operational processes and the company culture of the merged organization. In addition, they are characterized by restructuring and downsizing the organization in order to achieve the expected synergies ([50] Marks, 2006). Failure rates of mergers, mostly measured by the financial results of the merged companies concerned, reach from 50 to 80 per cent ([28] Jansen, 2001).
Although there has been an increase in PMI research ([5] Birkinshaw et al. , 2000; [22] DiFonzo and Bordia, 1998; [26] Greenwood et al. , 1994; [31] Kavanagh and Ashkanasy, 2006; [35] Kusstatscher and Cooper, 2005; [37] Larsson and Finkelstein, 1999) the knowledge of the integration process is still limited ([17] Cartwright and Schoenberg, 2006; [24] Epstein, 2004).
Advances have been made by studying mergers from different aspects including the human side of mergers ([6] Blake and Mouton, 1985; [15] Cartwright and Cooper, 1993; [27] Hayes, 1979; [37] Larsson and Finkelstein, 1999), communication ([64] Schweiger and DeNis, 1991) and change processes ([1] Alaranta, 2006; [69] van Dick et al. , 2004) using different perspectives like social identity ([18] Chreim, 2007; [35] Kusstatscher and Cooper, 2005; [68] Vaara, 2003) or decision making ([56] Pablo, 1994). But PMI research is still fragmented and different schools of thought concentrate on different aspects of the PMI process, and therefore can make only a limited contribution to the understanding of the integration processes ([62] Schewe et al. , 2007).
PMI is a complex phenomenon and involves a vast number of influencing variables. Hard facts, but also soft facts, have an important impact on success or failure of the integration, and these range...