Improving the M&A Decision-Making Process: Learning from Serial Acquirers

摘要

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) represent a substantial means to implement corporate and business unit strategy. However, capturing expected value proves to be very challenging. While previous studies on acquisition decision-making have identified a number of impediments to process, they lack a rich and theoretically grounded description of how to systematically mitigate those obstacles. Our research setting is four firms from the German industry sector. Using a multi-case inductive study, we analyze how serial strategic acquirers—all equipped with a dedicated M&A function—have designed their M&A decision-making process. We find that firms rely on group decision-making mechanisms, following three procedural strategies and one governance strategy.