COMMITTING KEY EMPLOYEES DURING THE POST-ACQUISITION INTEGRATION PHASE – CASE STUDY EVIDENCE FROM A EUROPEAN-INDIAN ACQUISITION
Mélanie Raukko, International Business, Department of Marketing, Turku School of Economics, Finland

Abstract
It has been argued, that especially in knowledge-intensive acquisitions, ,some key persons are important to retain in order to ensure the success of the acquisition. (e.g. Ranft & Lord 2000; 2002) Turnover and commitment literature imply that the most important factor affecting turnover intentions is organizational commitment (e.g. Mowday et al. 1979; Allen & Meyer 1990; Price 2000). This research focuses on the organizational commitment of the key persons in the target company. The main research question is “how to commit the key personnel of the acquired company following a cross-border acquisition”, which can be further divided into 3 sub-questions: 1. how the key personnel’s organizational commitment differ from the personnel’s organizational commitment, 2. how key personnel perceive the committing efforts of the parent company, and 3. what commits key persons. The case is a European-Indian acquisition in the IT sector. The data was collected using both qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys.
Keywords: organizational commitment, cross-border acquisitions, longitudinal case study