Research Seminar in International Business on Mergers and Acquisitions

​The EmoMA project arranged a research seminar 17 November 2016 at Turku School of Economics in International Business having professor Christina Öberg from University of Örebro, Sweden, as a guest speaker. She presented a comprehensive overview on the current research themes on M&As and offered new perspectives on how M&As could be further studied. The current issues influencing the number of M&As are the general uncertainty of the world and changes in financial markets. Uncertainty may decrease the number of M&As but the zero interest rates on the other hand encourage firms to invest and grow by acquisitions. Öberg called for cross-disciplinary research in order to establish new interesting perspectives on M&As - sometimes “forgetting” what is already known can give rise to novel insights. Handling time-specific and time-changing scenarios as well as considering the entire network influenced by M&As could provide new areas of research.

The EmoMA project team presented the findings from the EmoMA research project’s different working packages that had been tailored to explore integration processes and outcomes of the partner companies. It was found out that virtuality can take different forms after an acquisition and can serve as a great facilitator of communication but it is not a good tool if there is not initially a good face-to-face communication relationship. Cultural differences pose an extra challenge for virtual communications since it is difficult to interpret the small emotional cues through virtual channels.  It was also discovered that good dialogue can further integration and finding a common language (sharing the same meanings of words) promotes establishment of a unified culture. It is important to recognize that there are negative but also many positive emotions related to the integration phase and cultivating positivity enables creation of collective identities.