Integrating businesses after a merger represents a major challenge for firms yet we still don’t know enough how to do integration effectively. Scholars have focused on various factors such as poor strategic alignment, structural fit, and cultural differences. The influence of historical factors has remained overlooked—in particular past significant emotional events that created enduring affective anchors in the organization’s collective memory and shaped members’ current behavior. Following the ‘historical turn’ in strategy and organization, our study advances theory on the effect of what we call emotional junctures on the integration process and its structural outcomes. We propose a process model through an inductive, interpretivist study of a post-merger integration (PMI) involving two large companies.
