Stakeholder orientation and acquisition performance

In this paper, we study how a firm’s stakeholder orientation affects the performance of its corporate acquisitions. We depart from prior literature and suggest that orientations towards employees, customers, suppliers and local communities will affect long-term acquisition performance both directly and through its interactions with process characteristics, such as pre-acquisition relatedness and post-acquisition integration. Analyses of data on a sample of 1,884 acquisitions show overall a positive association between acquirers’ stakeholder orientation and acquisition performance. In addition, we find support for a positive moderation of business relatedness on the performance impacts of stakeholder orientation. Structural integration has a similarly positive moderation effect only for some of the stakeholder categories.