1 Setting the Scene
In writing this book, I ask where the place for humanity is in the bottom line of a company. We have a tendency to reduce business to numbers, considering returns on investments, profit and loss statements, operating margins and so forth. Yet, we forget that behind each number is a living breathing human being: CEOs who draw strategic outlines, salesclerks handling orders and billing, line workers twisting bolts. These people do not stop being human as they enter the workplace. They do not stop experiencing emotions, they do not become perfectly rational and predictable and, often, they do not enjoy being considered as a mere number on the companyās fact sheet. But why should this matter?
In the past few decades, the soft side of business has gained increasing attention. Although buzzwords such as efficiency and costs continue to intrigue scholars and practitioners alike, the rising levels of distrust and dissatisfaction among employees have driven attention towards the more human aspects of business (Karlgaard 2014). Thanks to scholarly attention, we now know that emotions pervade not just our everyday behaviour, but also organizations (Ashkanasy 2003).
The shift in attention towards the softer side of business has been very influential in the field of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The human side of acquisitions used to be considered through ticking a box; in effect, considering human resource (HR) management in an acquisition checklist, entailing everything from salaries to corporate culture. Yet, in the modern world, it is becoming increasingly clear that the value of a company cannot be measured solely through traditional tangible assets. Instead, the value of a company may largely reside in its employees (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010).
Indeed, the past 30 years have shown increasing attention being placed on the human side of acquisitions (e.g. Sarala et al. 2019), deepening our understanding of post-acquisition integration as a softer human process in addition to the hard cold facts (Cartwright and Cooper 1995). The hard and the soft have been found to be complementary; whereas task integration focuses on realizing operational synergies, human integration aims at creating positive attitudes and unification (Birkinshaw et al. 2000). Stemming from this discovery, a growing body of literature argues that acquisition failure is often caused by sociocultural challenges during the integration (e.g. Datta 1991; Marks and Mirvis 2011; Raitis et al. 2018).
At the same time, acquisition scholars have become increasingly interested in emotions, studying them from various perspectives, including coping, antecedents of negative emotions, emotional outcomes, emotional attending, emotion regulation, employee behaviour and managerial reactions (Fugate et al. 2002; Kiefer 2005; Clarke and Salleh 2011; Reus 2012; Fink and Yolles 2015; Gunkel et al. 2015; Durand 2016). The consensus seems to be that during acquisitions, emotions are usually triggered by perceived challenges in upholding accustomed organizational values, and that they normally peak around a public announcement (Sinkovics et al. 2011). Yet, despite empirical evidence regarding positive emotions (e.g. Kusstatscher 2006; Raitis et al. 2017), previous research seems to conclude that emotions are typically negative and cause poor organizational outcomes (Graebner et al. 2017). Thus, a more positive perspective on sociocultural integration seems warranted (Stahl et al. 2013). However, first it is necessary to understand exactly what emotions are.
2 What Is Emotion?
2.1 Emotion, Affect and Mood
Historically, emotions have been considered primitiveāas something undesirable, unintelligent and unreliableāand which should be restrained by logic (Solomon 2008). These sentiments, however, began to fade in the mid-twentieth century, with emotions becoming a central phenomenon in research around the new millennium (Ben-Zeāev and Krebs 2018). While emotions can still be considered currents in the ocean, flashes of unwitting primal passion, pushing us to behave in certain ways, we can always identify their object: Emotions are fundamentally about something (Nussbaum 2004). This separates emotions from other affective phenomena.
Affect refers to a myriad of phenomena, such as emotion or mood (Guerrero et al. 1996). A core affect reflects a state that can be positioned along two separate continuums: pleasure/displeasure and activation/deactivation. It directs our attention towards similarly valenced states and motivates behaviour. When the core affect is prolonged but not directed at an object, it becomes a mood (Russell 2003). Moods reflect an attitude towards our environment, without a definable cause (Guerrero et al. 1996). Only when the affective state has a causeāa triggerādoes it become an emotion.
Emotion is a generic label through which we describe experiences (Gordon 1987). While many definitions have arisen, modern research seems to agree that emotions are componential; they include appraisal, action readiness, physiological cues, subjective feelings and behavioural outcomes (Scherer and Moors 2019). This book takes a subjective experiential viewpoint on emotion that emphasizes cognition...