A Comparative Study on the Performance of Employees in Cases of Indo-UK and Indo-USA Mergers and Acquisitions

Global investment in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) has reached unprecedented levels in recent years (Barkema and Schijven, 2008). Against this backdrop, the objective of the paper is to explore employee performance in cases of Indo-UK and Indo-USA M&A. The focus of the study is to capture the change in employee performance at individual level, of both target and acquiring companies, in two sets of samples, Indo-UK and Indo-USA M&A. As far as methodology is concerned, employee performance is measured through self-assessment of changes in determinants of performance using the Performance Diagnosis Matrix (PDM) of Holton (Swanson and Holton, 2001). The factors determining performance are: goals, systems, capacity, motivation and expertise. On the other hand, Hofstede's cultural distance index is used to calculate the cultural distance of the countries involved in M&A. The paper then compares cultural distance between India-UK and India- USA with reported changes in determinants of performance of sampled employees who have experienced this transition. The sample contains 42 respondents from three Indo-UK merged entities and 30 respondents from two Indo-US merged entities. The study diagnoses changes in determinants of performance among these two sets of responses to arrive at inferences which may have meaningful indicators for corporate policy in case of future M&A between India-UK and India-USA