Alichi, Anis and Strobl, Andreas and Bauer, Florian (2025) The Downside of Intensive Acquisitions : The Moderating Role of Board Involvement and Gender Diversity. In: 41st EGOS Colloquium - Athens, The American College of Greece, 2025-07-03 - 2025-07-05, The American College of Greece.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Firms are undertaking multiple acquisitions in a certain amount of time (acquisition intensity) to develop their capabilities and sustain their competitive advantage. Despite the aim of creating value, acquisition intensity can have negative consequences on financial performance since there will remain little time and attention for firms to examine, digest, and integrate each acquisition deliberately. Although previous research has identified the negative effects of acquisition intensity on the firm’s financial performance, still a key gap remains in understanding the mechanisms through which these effects occur, and how governance characteristics may moderate this relationship. By examining 664 acquisitions undertaken in 12 years by the top 100 family firms in Germany, we identified a negative relation between acquisition intensity and acquirers’ long-term financial performance. Moreover, we found that certain organisational design choices, namely board involvement and board gender diversity, play a moderating role in this relation. Our finding suggests that at low to moderate levels of acquisition intensity, board involvement and gender diversity help attenuate this negative effect on firm’s financial performance, while at high levels of intensity, these two moderators will exacerbate the negative effect.