The importance of internal communication during organisational M&A: Case study

Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are considered one of the most efficient ways of expanding organisational performance. Successful mergers and acquisitions include a critical consideration of a set of different variables, from which a major is the people-related variables. Those directly affects the performance of the process and integration of the operations. In managing the people-related variables during mergers and acquisitions, communication is strategically important. Efficient management of communicational matters, such as the right approach of communication, may affect the acknowledgment of the M&A, integration of the two companies, as well as the operative performance of the organisation during the process. Therefore, the work focuses on researching internal communication in mergers and acquisitions.

The literature framework elaborates the communicational factors related to corporations, including change communication and different approaches. Also, communication during M&As is a critical theoretical aspect of this work. However, existing literature lacks in stating the communication factors during M&A on the employees’ side, and thus, this work aims to address that further.

Given the novelty of the research question, this thesis explores questions with a single case study, where several different viewpoints from the specific case are considered. The communicational factors during M&A are researched by qualitative interviews gathered from the project management’s side, and quantitative questionnaires gathered from the employees’ side by studying their interpretations and opinions on the success of the M&A communication plan. This allows for comparing the aims and outcomes from both sides and revealing the critical differences between those.

The study finds the employees' understanding of the aims and expected outcomes differing with the project management team. The communication approaches and action models appear to be efficient and paraphrase the patterns of the literature framework, but still unsuccessfully partially engage employees in the merger communication. Organisational culture will be aligned by aims of further explore the term and implement jointly organisational culture throughout the integration process. The thesis contributes to the literature by shedding light on extending the successfulness of merger communication from models and approaches more towards individualization and case-by-case communication.