Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on the Mental Health and Overall Wellbeing of the Employees Involved – A Literature Review

Abstract

Strategic Alliances, like mergers and acquisitions are one of the options organizations undertake to grow.A merger involves merging or coming together of two organizations and acquisition is a process when oneorganization acquires another of its interest.1 Organizations enter into strategic alliances to compete in theassociated market and expand their share in the market, to enter into new geographical areas, to add newproduct profiles, to capitalize the newer technologies available and also add to their financial competencies.This research paper reviews various literature available on the effect of mergers and acquisitions on themental wellbeing and overall wellbeing of the employees associated with the organizations undergoingthese major changes. Mergers and acquisitions follow three stages and each stage flows into the other, thereare various factors which play a very critical role for enabling the mergers and acquisitions to achieve whatthey set to achieve at each stage. There are various hard factors like the financial parameters, adequateplanning for financial and operational integration by capitalizing on the previous experience, assessment ofrisks and strengths, eliminating excess payments, and various soft issues ,like the cultural issues, ensuringextended assurance from the leadership, facilitating proper and timely communication to avoid unwanteddissemination of information, ensuring adequate speed for the implementation plans , ensuring visible andaccountable steps like designating an integration manger to handle all the dilemmas in context to the humanresources, implementing various reporting structures and facilitating the combined ways to deal with criticalissues, collaborating with the critical teams in the process of integration, efficiently managing the variousissues pertaining to human resources to ensure employee motivation and sustainability and implementingvarious plans to enable and ensure the proper amalgamation of the cultures of the organizations involved tominimize and eliminate the negative effects on the mental wellbeing and ensure the overall wellbeing of theemployees involved in the process.1