A qualitative examination of the relationship between organizational resilience and post-merger integration in the airline industry

Whilst the popularity of merger and acquisitions (M&A), as a method for achieving several corporate strategic goals persists, so too does the high failure rate of this activity. The extant literature frequently attributes M&A failure to post-merger integration (PMI) issues.Therefore, understanding the organizational capabilities and characteristics that enable or inhibit PMI is a key challenge for M&A scholarship. Within PMI scholarship, a specific under-examined issue concerns the link between post-merger integration (which creates uncertainties within the participating organizations) and organizational resilience (the study of how such uncertainties can be better managed). Organizational resilience can be broadly understood as the ability to bounce-back from failure or adversity. To date, there has been limited work that connects resilience and PMI, and existing research tends to focus upon how M&A affects employee resilience, rather than the role of resilience at the organization level for PMI processes and outcomes. This research provides an improved understanding of relationships between organizational resilience and PMI processes and outcomes by drawing on empirical research conducted in the airline industry. The airline industry is selected because it is a large, complex and global industry within which M&A activity is frequently undertaken. Key contributions are three-fold. First, this research bridges the gap between two fields which are currently theoretically disconnected and where an integrated theorization has significant potential to inform both future research and advance practice. Second, by identifying how organizational resilience relates to PMI, the empirical analysis informs the creation of a novel inductive model and a set of associated propositions which can be used to frame future research.Third, for practice audiences, the project’s findings suggest a range of organizational interventions that could support organizations in navigating the uncertainty inherent inPMI.