Organizational Members’ Sensemaking of Post-acquisition Integration Over Time : a Case Study

Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) continue to show high failure rates, often attributed to the underestimation of human and behavioral aspects during post-acquisition integration. Despite growing interest in the micro-level dynamics of M&A, significant gaps remain in understanding how acquired employees experience and interpret integration, how this varies across organizational levels, and how perceptions evolve over time. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative single case study of the acquisition of an Italian family-founded manufacturing company by an American multinational. The acquisition occurred in 2013 and was analyzed thirteen years later. Data were collected through five semi-structured interviews with participants from different organizational levels of the acquired company and analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings show that acquired employees’ sensemaking is structured around several interrelated dimensions. The pre-acquisition context acts as an interpretive lens, while the multilevel sensegiving structure mediates information from higher to lower levels. Together with the integration strategy implemented by the acquirer, these elements shape two main dimensions of the integration experience: identity and emotion. The study also identifies a third experiential dimension: operational continuity or discontinuity. The integration experience varies systematically across hierarchical levels. Uncertainty and negative emotions were concentrated precisely at managerial levels, where access to information was greater. This pattern reverses the common assumption in the literature that negative emotions mainly arise from a lack of information. The findings show that the multilevel sensegiving structure filtered exposure to uncertainty, suggesting that the relationship between information asymmetry, uncertainty, and negative emotions is not direct, but depends on the quality of mediation between organizational levels. The asymmetry in operational experience was also found to result from a deliberate managerial choice to preserve continuity at lower levels. The retrospective perspective adopted in the study reveals the dynamics characterizing the temporal evolution of sensemaking: subjective turning points linked to participants’ roles and exposure to integration, a distinction between the formal and experiential completion of the process, and a positive retrospective reframing of the acquisition shared by all participants. These findings suggest that adopting a sufficiently long time perspective makes it possible to observe mechanisms that shorter time frames in the literature have not yet systematically documented.