I want to do my thesis about managing emotions in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. However, I find it very difficult to come to a specific research question. I want to focus on how to manage the emotions of employees during the post-integration phase of cross-border M&As. Although, it is still very vague and broad. Therefore, I want to narrow my RQ to something specific. For this moment, I focused on positive and negative emotions and how to manage/ change the negative emotions into positive emotions (narrowing down the negative emotions). However, I am quite desperate and not sure where to focus on and what is a good RQ/ what to write about. Can somebody help me?
Here's an idea for your research question:
Positive:
1. Do workers collaborate closely after the merger and acquisition?
2. Are workers highly interested in learning how to solve problems under a new working procedure established from the merger and acquisition?
3. Have the employees been communicating effectively with each other despite of their differences in occupational background from the merger and acquisition?
Negative:
1. Do the workers isolate themselves from the working process that requires full cooperation and coordination from the merger and acquisition?
2. Has there been more of conflicting ideas on problem solving between workers since the merger and acquisition had occurred?
3. Are the employees withholding important information from others who really need to know due to a lack of trust from the merger and acquisition?
Hope this helps with your thesis. Good luck😁
HR Managers need to be cross culturally intelligent and the organization culture should be geocentric in nature!
I would limit my study to one known method of managing others' emotions. Don't try to cover them all. Perhaps expressing empathy would be be one such method.
I would also limit the study to two specific cultures. Don't try to cover them all. The world is too complex.
So a possible research question would be "Can managers of culture A be trained to become more empathetic with employees of culture B?"
A research design could include randomly assigning members of Culture A to a "training in cross-cultural empathy" condition and a "no training in cross-cultural empathy" condition. After training (or after a placebo treatment), a member of Culture B interacts with a member of Culture A and rates him or her on empathy. If the level of empathy of people who received the training is higher than those who didn't, you will have demonstrated that cross-cultural empathy can be taught.
I would suggest you focus on a specific condition of M&A. Aggressive M&A that wants to add products in a consolidated company that already has a reliable and efficient structure might create several problems for associates from the acquired company. On the other hand, when the company wants to enter a new segment that is not a core business and, there is no knowledge the M&A might be smooth.
Companies' culture conflict also might be a specific field for our research.
M&A 's are notorious for their failure to realize full benefits, often due to a lack of cultural due diligence. The incongruence between the values systems of the two companies are often to blame, and supporting employees in understanding their emotions and thoughts in relation to the value systems and their deeper needs could be useful.
It feels like you trying to deal with the symptom of poor leadership rather than the cause of a badly executed merger or acquisition. I would have thought a more pertinent and useful question would be how do leaders carry out M&A while minimising the emotional fallout that creates reduced sustainable effectiveness and productivity. After all we all know that a big majority of mergers and acquisitions are a failure in strategic and financial terms, and there is growing evidence that one of the main causes is they don't get the relationships and blending of culture right. A final point, although x-border M&As are more complicated because of the extra level of national culture, they are fundamentally the same as all M&A in that dealing with the culture is a very important part that is often ignored. Success requires Transpersonal Leaders - see www.leadershapeglobal.com/lbte
I'm going to suggest that you relook at the question you're trying to answer... There are a number of excellent suggestions above. I would also you also look at outcome measures in terms of whether or not a particular M&A scenario resulted in the desired outcomes or not. Then look at what the gaining organization did (or didn't do) to ensure the M&A was successful. I'd also suggest that you control for a specific industry. What you do in one industry make not make sense for another industry... Depending on the questoin you ask and your research plan, you could end up with a great deal of qualitative data where it would make sense to use a product like "NVivo" to aggregate and analyze interview data... Just a lesson learned...
You can check the following article to explore insights about the issue of emotional adjustments:
Article The Relationship between Emotional Dimensions of Sustainable...
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