(BQ) Part 2 book "International human resource management" has contents: Outsourcing and human resource management, international leadership development; recruitment and selection of international managers; international pay and compensation; international and comparative employee voice. | Find more at Chapter 7 Cross-border mergers and acquisitions Tony Edwards and Chris Rees Key aims The aims of this chapter are to: ● examine the pressures on firms to integrate HR policies in the two parties to the merger, focusing on the role of the nationality of the parent firm in shaping this process; ● consider the features of host countries which influence the nature of restructuring in the post-merger period; ● highlight the ‘political’ dimension to cross-border M&As, including the role of a range of groups within a firm who will seek to influence the character of the new firm; ● establish the challenges that firms face in learning from acquired operations. Introduction Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are of particular concern to those interested in IHRM. The process of merging two firms, whether they be from different countries or not, raises a number of HR issues: the details of the merger and its likely implications for employees must be communicated; management must decide on the extent to which they will seek to integrate pay and benefit policies; and the employment consequences of the restructuring that follows most mergers must be confronted (. Teerikangas et al. 2014). The way in which these issues are handled, and the quality of leadership in particular, are important in shaping the fortunes of firms that have gone through international M&As (Gill 2012). The impact of a merger or acquisition, particularly the nature of restructuring, depends in large part on the rationale for it and the context in which it takes place. For example, a merger based on adverse trading conditions, over-capacity and the desire to cut costs is much more likely to lead to large-scale redundancies than one based on an expansion into new markets (Aguilera and Dencker 2004). The impact of cross-border M&As is also likely to be strongly shaped by national effects. These national effects show up in two ways; first, in terms of
