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Skillful management of employees after a merger or acquisition (M&A) is one of the key aspects to ensuring a successful deal, and most notably to ensure talent retention. This paper aims to describe how Bristol Myer Squibb (BMS) efficiently integrated Celgene after it bought the company for a near-record $74bn in 2019. The authors explain the structural elements applied during the premerger phase (acquisition experience, partner location and portfolio alignment) and the subsequent postmerger decisions to ensure rapid integration (choice of the leadership team, cultural integration and the communication strategy).

This paper adopts a single-case approach of the second largest acquisition in the pharmaceutical industry. It analyzes the management and talent retention decisions taken to ensure rapid integration of Celgene while ensuring that employees felt engaged in the process. This was achieved despite the consideration challenges posed by the COVID-19 global lockdown.

M&As are well known for the HR challenges they generate such as change management, cultural clashes and increased employee turnover. This paper demonstrates how BMS was able to overcome these hurdles, combining a fast speed of integration with managerial dexterity.

This paper offers a concise and clear outline of the management strategies used by BMS to ensure a successful integration strategy. This approach included a strong respect for the human as well as financial and strategic aspects of the deal. For even greater clarity, this paper offers a diagrammatic representation of the strategy of BMS to improve the speed of integration.

One of major concerns of serial acquirers is to ensure value creation. However, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are well known for the key management problems they generate such as change management, cultural clashes and increased managerial turnover. Despite this, M&As also offer opportunities for integrating best practices. This paper aims to demonstrate how Danaher attempts to cultivate employee engagement in companies it has recently acquired.

This paper adopts a single-case approach to show how Danaher implements its in-house method – the Danaher Business System – a management system during the take over and the postacquisition phase.

The findings from this paper demonstrate best practice management and strategies needed to ensure successful M&As. Almost 40 years after serial acquisitions, Danaher is cited as one of the most successful serial acquirers. Its human approach to takeovers has been a central part of this.

This paper offers a concise and clear outline of the management strategies used by Danaher to ensure successful acquisitions relying on Kaizen and LEAN with a strong focus on the human side. During the takeover and postacquisition integration, Danaher’s human approach would appear to be a key differentiating element.

This study aims to address a significant gap in the literature by exploring the individual nature and microfoundation perspective of cultural friction during the integration phase following cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs). It focuses on the role of face, a pivotal facet of interactions within Asian organizations, elucidating its importance in post-M&A integration outcomes.

Using a conceptual approach, this study draws on three bodies of literature, namely, cultural friction, microfoundations and face concerns. It reconsiders cultural friction as a microfounded construct and introduces face concerns as a pivotal element to understanding the challenges faced by managers at the forefront of CBMAs involving Asian companies. The conceptual approach is illustrated with examples for the world of practice.

This research makes two significant contributions to the fields of CBMAs and cultural friction. First, it demonstrates the relevance of the concept of cultural friction at the individual level, shedding light on the complex post-CBMA integration process. Second, this study demonstrates the critical role of face concerns in the sociocultural integration following CBMAs. This is underexplored in extant literature.

The crucial role of face is well known to those working in Asia. Yet academic inquiry remains underdeveloped on this issue for CBMAs. The friction derived from face concerns provides additional insights into the nature of the cultural challenges confronting managers during sociocultural integration and elucidates the micro-mechanisms influencing individuals’ responses to cultural friction. This research responds to calls to examine the human side of M&As uncovering previously neglected issues within intercultural managerial encounters.

We propose that institutional logics are resources organizations use to leverage their strategic choices. We argue that firms with an awareness of multiple available logics, expressed by a larger stock of competences and a broader industrial scope are more likely to add an institutional logic to their repertoire and to become purist in this new logic. We also hypothesize that a favorable opportunity set as expressed by status leads high and low status firms to add a logic but not to focus exclusively on this new logic. We examine our hypotheses in the French industrial design industry from 1989 to 2003 in which a managerialist logic emerged and prevailed along with the pre-existing institutional logics of modernism and formalism. Our findings contribute to theory on the relationship between organizations’ strategy and institutional change and partially address the paradox of why high-status actors play a key role in triggering institutional change when such change is likely to undermine the very basis of their social position and advantage.

This study aims to investigate the impact of the innovative ritual-based redesign of a routine in the challenging context of the dining-out sector, characterized by low employee commitment and high turnover.

This study adopts a mixed methods experimental design. This study focuses on a field experiment in a real restaurant centered on the restaurant’s welcome entrée routine. The routine is first observed as it happens, after which it is redesigned as a ritual.

The ritual-based redesign of the routine enhances employee sharing of the purpose of the routine and reduces the variability of the execution time of the routine, which increases group cohesion among the restaurant staff. Besides the positive impact on the routine’s participants, the ritual-based redesign has a beneficial effect on the performance of the routine by increasing the enjoyment of the end-consumers at the restaurant.

The ritual-based redesign of routines is a powerful managerial tool that bonds workers into a solidary community characterized by strong and shared values. This allows guidance of the behavior of new and existing employees in a more efficient and less time-consuming way.

Rituals have been traditionally analyzed from the customer perspective as marketing tools. This research investigates the employees’ perspective, leveraging ritual-based redesign as a managerial tool for increasing cohesion among workers.