Employee Turnover in the Context of Mergers and Acquisitions Transactions (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, FH Vienna, language: English, abstract: Which factors impact the likelihood and extent of employee turnover after M&A transactions?
What measures can be taken during post-merger integration to retain key players?
This master thesis gathered and evaluated knowledge of experts in the field of M&A regarding employee turnover and employee retention.

The yearly number of worldwide M&A transactions increased from 1990 to 2019 by nearly five times. The yearly average increased steadily over the last decades. The 1990's averaged about 20.500 deals, the 2000's 37.000 deals and the 2010's 46.500 deals per year. (Thomson Financial, Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances [IMAA], 2020)
Smith (2002) analyzed 49 studies regarding the success rates of organizational change. Among them were also 9 studies concerning M&A transactions. The median success rates for these transactions stated at 33%, while the median success rate for all analyzed studies in different forms of organizational change, ranging from strategy deployment to general culture change or software implementation, also was 33%.

It should be mentioned that the measurements of success for most forms of organizational change are varying or sometimes not disclosed at all and therefore these results should be taken with caution. A valuable takeaway of Smith's analysis though definitely should be the assumption that change in organizations is very often accompanied by a myriad of hurdles and challenges.

More recent academic work also backs that statement. Malmendier, Moretti, and Peters (2018) looked at stock performance of winning and losing bidders. They conclude that the entities that lost takeover bids on average outperform the winning bidders by 24 to 37% over the next 3 years.
King, Dalton, Daily, and Covin (2004) come to the conclusion that on average M&A activity does not lead to improvements of financial performance for the acquiring company. Instead, their results show either no or a slightly negative change in performance post-merger.