Mergers and Acquisitions in Practice

11The Link Between Cultural Due Diligence and Sociocultural Post-Merger Integration Management as a Critical Success Factor in M&As

Natalie Witzmann and Christoph Dörrenbächer

Introduction

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are today’s main vehicle for corporate growth. This is the case even though 66–75 per cent of M&As fail to create any shareholder value (McKinsey, 2010: 1). Some studies even stress that 40 per cent of M&As among large firms end in what is called a ‘total failure’, in which the acquiring companies are far from recovering their capital investments (Carleton and Lineberry, 2004: 9). The high failure rate and the immense costs related to the failure of M&As are growing concerns not only for shareholders but also for stakeholders, ...