Camelia Oancea - Organizational Psychology of Mergers and Acquisitions: Examining Leadership and Employee Perspectives

Organizational Psychology of Mergers and Acquisitions provides a comprehensive perspective that helps you understand, empathise, and protect the well-being of employees who experience mergers and acquisitions. This book gives a state-of-the-art review that crosses different subjects within psychology including psychobiology, neuroscience, social psychology, interpersonal relationships, and organizational psychology.

This book discusses why many employees think of mergers or acquisitions as scary or threatening events, why negative emotions are prevalent, their psychobiological impact, and how to assess employees emotional responses using a new toolkit. It helps readers learn what counts as good leadership, considering the role of charisma, personality, context, and information processing abilities. This book includes the issue of organizational learning, and the relevance of occupational health and safety to due diligence about mergers and acquisitions through case studies about organizations sued for cancer or cancer-related mortality after a merger or acquisition.

This book is mandatory reading for students, academics, and practitioners working with organizations experiencing a merger or an acquisition such as consultants, human resource professionals, psychologists, occupational health professionals, and employees involved in strategy, management, or people development.

Camelia Oancea is a machine learning engineer at Airbus Defence and Space. She currently combines her career in artificial intelligence at Airbus with doctoral research at Birkbeck University of London, UK.

Caroline Kamau is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

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Organizational Psychology of Mergers and Acquisitions

Camelia Oancea and Caroline Kamau

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 Camelia Oancea and Caroline Kamau

The right of Camelia Oancea and Caroline Kamau to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-81488-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-74715-6 (ebk)

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This book was jointly written by Camelia Oancea and Dr. Caroline Kamau, with roughly 50% of contributions by each author in writing and developing each chapter. Camelia is a machine learning engineer at Airbus Defence and Space, and she has been working on a part-time doctoral degree in organizational psychology with Caroline as her supervisor. Caroline is a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and she has been an academic for nearly 20 years. Carolines specialism is research about occupational health. She has published in prestigious journals such as Nature, and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. Carolines research about burnout and other aspects of occupational health has been featured in national newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times.

Camelia felt inspired to study for a PhD in mergers and acquisitions while she was working in marketing and strategy development at Repower, an energy company that experienced two cross-border acquisitions. At the time, she was working on marketing new products and services, and was involved in various projects relating to the acquisition. This included analysing market data, such as by examining the volatility of prices and consumer markets. She started working on a part-time PhD with Carolines supervision and, together, they worked on this book about the psychology of mergers and acquisitions.

Both Camelia and Caroline are interdisciplinary scientists with a knack for synthesising vast amounts of information and making it accessible to readers from any field. Camelias work at Airbus involves using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Before that, Camelia was a senior data scientist at E.ON, an energy company, and a data scientist at A&D Pharma, where her work included using machine learning and natural language processing. Carolines work includes systematic reviews, meta-analyses, experiments, and randomised-controlled trials. Together, they have applied their detailed, methodological approach to write this book.

This book offers a fresh perspective on how employees who experience mergers or acquisitions tend to feel, think, and act by giving you a state-of-the-art review of the field. This book is written in a way that avoids jargon and crosses different subject fields in psychology including psychobiology, neuroscience, social psychology, interpersonal relationships, and organizational psychology. This book is accessible to you whether you are a student, academic, practitioner, or an employee researching or learning about mergers and acquisitions. This book is mandatory reading for any type of practitioner or employee who is working with an organization that is experiencing a merger or acquisition such as consultants, human resource professionals, psychologists, occupational health professionals, and employees involved in strategy, management, or people development. For those of you who are students or academics, this book is for you whether or not your primary field is psychology your field might be business, management, organizational behaviour, or any other field concerned with the perspectives of employees who are experiencing a merger or acquisition.

The ultimate purpose of this book is to help you understand, empathise, and work on protecting the wellbeing of employees who experience mergers and acquisitions.

This chapter will introduce you to different types of mergers and acquisitions, helping you understand the reasons that inspire organizations to engage in them. A merger or acquisition is a legal transaction in which one organization transfers or combines some or all of its operations to or with another organization. In an acquisition, one organization transfers operations upwards to another organization that becomes its legal parent. In a merger, two organizations transfer sideways to a new organization that is the sum of its two parts and they often rebrand the name of the organization with a new name, a hyphenated name, or one of the two organizations names. By operations we mean an organizations stock (e.g. products to sell to customers), assets (e.g. buildings, equipment, vehicles, or staff), liabilities (e.g. debts), and equity (e.g. net profit). This chapter will start by discussing commonly used words in mergers or acquisitions to extrapolate what different words really mean and whether they are useful or superfluous (not necessary). We will discuss ways in which the media and public sometimes confuse mergers with acquisitions, and how organizations sometimes misrepresent acquisitions as mergers because acquisitions are stereotyped as hostile whereas mergers are stereotyped as friendly. We will then discuss five types of mergers, with examples from real organizations that have combined their brands and operations in such deals. We will discuss horizontal mergers, market extension mergers, vertical mergers, product extension mergers, and conglomerate mergers, and we will briefly discuss the psychological implications for employees as an introduction to this book. After this, we will present a new taxonomy defining different types of acquisitions in 15 ways, with examples from organizations that have embarked on such deals. We will also draw some conclusions about the psychological implications of acquisitions for employees as an introduction to this book. Finally, we will summarise the conclusions you can draw from this chapter. Let us start by understanding what mergers and acquisitions are and how they differ.