The Role of Integration Managers in Post-Acquisition Integration: A Decision-Making Perspective

Abstract

Although the existing literature recognizes the role of integration managers in post-acquisition integration, it not only positions them as mere executors of the top management’s targets, but also tends to disguise them under the overall term of ‘integration manager’ regardless of their area of expertise. Quite often integration managers and integration teams are positioned at the boundaries between top management and the rest of the merging organization where their role might include giving sense to a new strategy and structure and interpreting various unanticipated events that emerge during post-acquisition integration. They tend to play a very important but highly undervalued decision-making role. We have a limited understanding of how individual integration managers influence decision-making in an integration team setting during post-acquisition integration. The findings of this in-depth qualitative case study research illustrate the key performing role of integration managers at both the individual and team level, where the level of integration managers’ contribution is being partly predetermined by the area of their expertise. The findings also showed that key decision-making activities were conducted at the team level. The paper presents a theoretical model of integration managers’ decision-making processes during the post-acquisition integration phase and makes two key contributions to the M&A literature. First, this paper constitutes the particular importance of integration managers in the way the post-acquisition integration evolves. Second, this research complements the simplicity of the rationalistic perspective on post-acquisition integration incorporating the chaotic reality of integration managers’ decisions-making who tend to fill in contradictory and/or equivocal cues of top management.