Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been a prominent topic in academic management literature and practice for decades (Cartwright and Schoenberg 2006). During the peak of the last mergers and acquisitions wave in 2007, the volume of the market for corporate control reached 4.83 trillion US dollars. Due to the current economic and financial crisis, the volume has decreased to 1.78 trillion US dollars in 2011 (according to Bloomberg). Despite the enormous amount of research in the field of M&As, the average success rates of M&As are quite low (Capasso and Meglio 2005). Failure rates between 40 and 60 percent are usually reported (Bagchi and Rao 1992; Cartwright and Cooper 1995), and some researchers state that they are even higher at between 70 and 90 percent (Christensen et al. 2011). Since the 1970s, the M&A phenomenon has been studied through several theoretical lenses (Birkinshaw et al. 2000; Haspeslagh and Jemison 1991). Financial studies still dominate current M&A research, but additional research streams have developed (Cartwright and Schoenberg 2006).