When Organizational Justice Matters for Affective Merger Commitment

Ralf Bebenroth and Kai Oliver Thiele
Additional contact information
Kai Oliver Thiele: Hamburg University of Technology(TUHH), Germany and Human Resource Management and Organizations (HRMO), Germany

No DP2015-22, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: We investigate when organizational justice matters to employees' commitment in the post-acquisition process after a company is overtaken in a cross-border acquisition. There is overwhelming evidence that employees who are treated fairly during acquisitions are more committed to their new firms. We extend this finding by dividing organizational justice into three sub-dimensions: informational justice, interpersonal justice, and procedural justice. We find evidence that procedural justice is an important antecedent of affective merger commitment at an early stage of the integration period, while informational justice becomes important at a later stage. Further analysis on heterogeneity between the target firm's employees and the bidder firm's employees reveals that, immediately after the acquisition, target-firm's employees value knowing where they will be at the new firm (procedural justice), while bidder-firm employees are more concerned about communication and transparency (informational justice). Our results point to the importance of organizational justice in a cross-border M&A setting and the need for a separate study of issues related to bidder firms and target firms.

Keywords: Lobby; Theorisation; Competition policy; Publishing; Japan; Resale price maintenance; Neoliberalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-com
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2015-22.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2015-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University 2-1 Rokkodai, Nada, Kobe 657-8501 JAPAN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office of Promoting Research Collaboration, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University ().