Chapter 4: Should Acquisitions Perform Well, Good, or Both?: A Stakeholder Perspective on Acquisition Performance

The conventional discourse about acquisitions is primarily concerned with understanding how they perform (e.g., Capron, 1999; Cording, Christman, & King 2008; Fowler & Schmidt, 1988). To the community of acquisition scholars, acquisition performance represents a central construct, and a huge amount of empirical studies aim to identify variables that explain or predict acquisition performance (e.g., King, Dalton, Daily, & Covin, 2004; Larsson & Finkelstein, 1999).

Meglio and Risberg (2011) conduct a narrative review of 101 articles that measure acquisition performance and uncover a multitude of conceptualizations and indicators used to measure performance under the unitary label of acquisition performance. The existence of a profusion of measures for acquisition performance explains not only the difficulty of summarizing research results through meta-analyses (Datta, Pinches, & Narayan, 1992; King et al., 2004) but also the widespread feeling that we know very little about acquisition performance (Bower, 2004).