Same Process, Different Worlds: How Organizational Hierarchy Influences the Experience of Post-Merger Integration

Abstract

This study examines how organizational hierarchy shapes the experience of post-merger integration in the context of a cross-border acquisition. Drawing on twenty-five semi-structured interviews across three positional groups, local employees (LE), local management (LM), and holding management (HM), the study investigates three sociocultural phenomena: social identity dynamics, merger syndrome, and organizational silence. The central question driving the investigation is how hierarchical position influences the conditions under which integration is experienced. Rather than treating these as parallel research topics, the study argues that they constitute analytically connected dimensions of a single underlying process, each systematically shaped by the hierarchical position of the actors who live through it. Social identity dynamics reveals how the recognition of organizational difference and the contestation of belonging were experienced differently depending on proximity to the integration’s institutional center. Merger syndrome shows how the emotional and organizational costs of that disruption accumulated most heavily where interpretive resources for contextualizing it were fewest. Organizational silence traces how the communicative consequences of those costs were structurally produced rather than individually chosen, with voice carrying consequential weight only where relational proximity to the acquiring organization’s decision-making center was present. The middle management layer is particularly highlighted as the hierarchical site at which all three phenomena converge with the greatest structural intensity, as middle managers simultaneously absorbed strategic directives from above, translated them downward for teams whose distress they could observe but not fully address, and navigated their own identity and emotional exposure in the space between. The central finding is that integration was not experienced as a single organizational event upon which different actors offered different perspectives, but as a stratified process whose experiential demands varied systematically with hierarchical position, with consequences becoming progressively heavier as distance from the decision-making center increased. The study advances an integrative framework connecting three established but theoretically separated literatures and argues that organizational hierarchy operates as a structural moderator of integration experience rather than a contextual backdrop, with the empirical material yielding several phenomenon-specific refinements to the literature on which the study draws.