Same Process, Different Worlds: How Organizational Hierarchy Influences the Experience of Post-Merger Integration

Sammanfattning

This study examines how organizational hierarchy shapes the experience of post-mergerintegration in the context of a cross-border acquisition. Drawing on twenty-five semi-structuredinterviews across three positional groups, local employees (LE), local management (LM), andholding management (HM), the study investigates three sociocultural phenomena: socialidentity dynamics, merger syndrome, and organizational silence. The central question drivingthe investigation is how hierarchical position influences the conditions under which integrationis experienced. Rather than treating these as parallel research topics, the study argues that theyconstitute analytically connected dimensions of a single underlying process, eachsystematically shaped by the hierarchical position of the actors who live through it. Socialidentity dynamics reveals how the recognition of organizational difference and the contestationof belonging were experienced differently depending on proximity to the integration’sinstitutional center. Merger syndrome shows how the emotional and organizational costs ofthat disruption accumulated most heavily where interpretive resources for contextualizing itwere fewest. Organizational silence traces how the communicative consequences of those costswere structurally produced rather than individually chosen, with voice carrying consequentialweight only where relational proximity to the acquiring organization’s decision-making centerwas present. The middle management layer is particularly highlighted as the hierarchical siteat which all three phenomena converge with the greatest structural intensity, as middlemanagers simultaneously absorbed strategic directives from above, translated them downwardfor teams whose distress they could observe but not fully address, and navigated their ownidentity and emotional exposure in the space between. The central finding is that integrationwas not experienced as a single organizational event upon which different actors offereddifferent perspectives, but as a stratified process whose experiential demands variedsystematically with hierarchical position, with consequences becoming progressively heavieras distance from the decision-making center increased. The study advances an integrativeframework connecting three established but theoretically separated literatures and argues thatorganizational hierarchy operates as a structural moderator of integration experience rather thana contextual backdrop, with the empirical material yielding several phenomenon-specificrefinements to the literature on which the study draws.