Strobl, Andreas and Bauer, Florian and Matzler, Kurt (2020) The impact of industry-wide and target market environmental hostility on entrepreneurial leadership in mergers and acquisitions. Journal of World Business, 55 (2): 100931. ISSN 1090-9516
Manuscript_final.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (773kB)
Abstract
Based on survey data from 115 acquisitions completed between 2008 and 2011 by European acquirers from German-speaking countries, we find evidence that entrepreneurial leadership is a strong predictor of exploration and a weaker but significant driver of exploitation outcomes following M&A. Industry-wide environmental hostility negatively impacts the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on exploitation. Target market environmental hostility negatively impacts the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on exploration. Thus, while entrepreneurial leadership is a key success factor of M&A performance by increasing both, post-merger exploration and exploitation, acquirers need to take environmental conditions at the industry and market level into account.