ABSTRACT
Measuring performance is a central issue for management scholars seeking to gauge the effectiveness of managerial decisions (March and Sutton 1997). Merger and acquisition (henceforth, acquisition) scholars have similarly produced a vast amount of empirical work endeavoring to assess the impact of acquisitions on the acquiring firm performance (e.g. Capron 1999; Cording et al. 2008; Fowler and Schmidt 1988). Decades of organizational performance research have yielded a notable lack of consensus about variables, indicators, and metrics (Carton and Hofer 2006; Daily 1994; Venkatraman and Ramanujam 1987). Interpretations of performance have ranged from relatively narrow, focusing on financial aspects as typically deployed by strategic management scholars, to relatively broad, encompassing effectiveness measures as typically employed by organizational scholars. Similarly the study of acquisition performance has resulted in many assessment instruments, including both financial (operational, accounting, and shareholder value) and non-financial (innovation, reputation, and market share) measures as documented in several reviews (e.g., Cording et al. 2010; Meglio and Risberg 2011; Zollo and Meier 2008).
