An Exploratory Study of Employee Support During Pre-and Post-Acquisition Integration at a Management Consultancy Company

The focus of this research is to advance an understanding of the human factors during preand post-acquisition from the employees’ perspective. With a specific focus on employees’ expectations and experiences of support in the area of the human factors. Such a study is important in order to provide insights into the existing high failure rates. Previous research suggested that through further research of the human factors during pre-and postacquisition, how employees respond to these factors, and what the employee needs are for support on employees would develop insights into support prescriptions to help proactively manage the impact of the human factors on employees during M&A. The approach adopted in this dissertation consisted of wide review of relevant literature on the human factors and the support prescriptions during pre-and post-acquisition, coupled with the collection and analysis of empirical data. The latter research methods deployed were 17 semi-structured interviews complimented by visual images and document analysis carried out a recent acquisition at Company-X. The findings from this research provide evidence that employees reactions during pre-and-post acquisition can be spilt into positive and negative, and the key support prescriptions that employees discussed were HR; management and cultural integration. Additionally, employees perceived there to be a lack of support during the postacquisition stage. A surprising finding of this research, is that it did not unearth employee expectations of support during the acquisition. The main conclusions drawn from this study are that human factors have different levels of impacts at the different stages of M&A, highlighting the need for a variety of support prescriptions at different stages. Additionally, pre-acquisition support is an under-developed area of research, yet adds significant value in shaping employees’ reactions to M&A. Recommendations for Company-X were made to consider effective people integration support plan for namely the post-acquisition stage. This dissertation recommends further research to focus on the pre-and post-acquisition support prescriptions through a longitudinal study