Organizational Integration and Wellbeing of Post-Acquisition Employees: Moderating Roles of Leadership and Coworker Support

The incidence of mergers and acquisitions tend to strain post-acquisition employees due to the tension and anxiety that their attendant job losses, redundancies, and work overload generate. Since mergers and acquisitions are virtually inevitable in today’s global economy, with employees exposed to new coworkers, new leadership, and new organizational cultures, understanding how these can be employed to stem job strain and its consequent threats on productivity and employee wellbeing is imperative. This research specifically aimed at investigating how job strain can be mitigated by the culture of organizational integration with social support from superiors and coworkers determining when and the extent to which this can happen. Employing a correlation design, a sample of 304 junior and mid-level employees of new generation commercial banks and telecommunication organizations in Lagos Nigeria responded to a survey instrument comprising relevant measures. Moderated regression analysis was carried out on the data generated which revealed significant negative influences of organizational integration, superior’s support, and coworker support on job strain; significant moderation of integration*job strain relationship by superior’s support; and insignificant moderation of same by coworker support. Post hoc analyses, regarding the integration*superior’s support interaction, revealed that superior’s support was effective in moderating the influence of organizational integration on job strain only when supportive leaders—to whom employees were directly subordinated—were involved in the integration process. Managements of merging organizations need to imbibe and effectively deploy the culture of integrating old and new employees, ensuring that superiors and management staff play significant supportive roles in the process.