Article,
Managing HRM risk in a merger
Employee Relations, 25 (1): 14-30 (February 2003)M3: Article.
Abstract
Most mergers fail. Quoted failure rates vary from 50 percent to 80 percent depending on the industry and measures used. Despite this, the corporate appetite for mergers continues unabated. The year 2000 was the sixth consecutive year of record levels of merger and acquisition activity worldwide. There were more than 36,700 transactions with a combined value of more than US$3.49 trillion. The number of jobs that these mergers impacted on has not been estimated, but conservatively it must run into the hundreds of thousands. For instance, at least 130,000 finance jobs have disappeared in western Europe alone as a result of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s. After a decade of relentlessly increasing merger activity, no country, industry or organization is immune--targets for merger and acquisition have ranged across airlines, banks, telecommunications, motion picture companies, manufacturers, Internet companies, computer companies, and even government institutions, to name but a few. Mergers are indisputably big business, and they are risky business.
Tags
- &
- banking
- business
- change;
- consolidation
- corp
- corporations;
- enterprises;
- labor
- management;
- merger
- of
- organizational
- personnel
- supply;
- westpac
