Is Speed of Integration inM&A Learnable? TheModerating Role of Organizational Learning on the Path of Speed of Integration on Performance

From a practical perspective speed of integration is recognized as an important success factor for the M&A integration outcome. Despite this fact the research area is largely neglected in the academic literature. The results of quantitative research on speed of integration provide us with results at a mixed blessing. There is empirical evidence for a positive, a negative, or a non-significant relationship between speed of integration and M&A performance. In line with research on speed of integration the results of acquisition experience are quite heterogeneous. In this paper we review the organizational and process literature on speed of integration and acquisition experience and develop a research model which integrates acquisition experience as a moderator for the task- and cultural integration speed effect on performance. With a sample of 104 horizontal and vertical transactions with acquirers from the German speaking part of Europe we demonstrate that cultural integration speed is beneficial while task integration speed is detrimental for M&A performance. While the effects of task integration speed becomes more positive with increasing acquisition experience, we find a slightly significant negative moderating effect for cultural integration speed. We conclude that task integration is learnable with regards to the harmonization of marketing, production, and systems while each cultural integration process is different and therefore organizational learning is not possible. Next to this we argue that firms underestimate the importance of cultural integration speed.