M&A failure: an interdisciplinary, systematic review

One way to increase M&A success is to avoid completing deals anticipated to fail, but associated literature is broad and fragmented. It studies M±A failure from various disciplinary perspectives and examines M&A failure at separate stages of the M&A process. We take stock of this diverse literature and synthesize what is known about M&A failure through a systematic literature review. This allows us to identify three blind spots of the current M&A failure literature that require urgent research attention: (a) clarity on the definition and operationalization of M&A failure, (b) more integration across disciplines, and (c) a more processual perspective across M&A phases instead of a within-phase analysis. Altogether, we provide a comprehensive framework of M&A failure where we identify different determinants of M&A failure based on a classification of different M&A perspectives throughout different phases of the M&A process.