3. Finding Unity in a Friendly Takeover

This chapter centres on finding unity when the us versus them thinking that is common in acquisitions is heightened. This setting often triggers negative protectionist attitudes in the target company employees. However, with careful emotion management, the integration process can become swifter and smoother. This chapter introduces a German–Finnish acquisition completed in early 2017. The findings stem from interviews, memo-like diaries and an employee satisfaction survey collected between 2017 and 2018. The findings indicate that understanding how group-shared and group-based emotions emerge in organizations based on either co-presence or identification can increase companies’ ability to influence employee emotions. Moreover, offering the employees positive emotion triggers through a positive emotional climate at work can greatly enhance unity during integration.