Experience of the Employment Relationship After a Merger**

Zusammenfassung

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Mergers and acquisitions create many management challenges. The development of a new employment relationship is one of the problems in such a situation. This paper investigates the influence of previous employment structures and the experience of previous employment relationships on the psychological contract, job satisfaction, job insecurity, and general health of employees in the context of a merged higher education institution. Employees of two previously independent universities that merged into one university completed a questionnaire. The two former universities had a very different history with very dissimilar employment relationships and experiences among personnel. This history influenced the experience of the employment relationship after the merger.

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Auszug

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Experience of the Employment Relationship After a Merger**

Introduction

Although a changing workplace is nothing new, the amount of radical changes and transformations of organizations seemed to escalate during the past few decades. Important phenomena in this respect are mergers and acquisitions. Although these are more prominent in the corporate landscape, they also occur in the public sector. Kode et al. (2003: 28) state, "internationally 96 020 companies came under new management through mergers and acquisitions (worth $3.4 trillion) from January 1990 to June 1997. It is estimated that in 1999 alone merger and acquisition activities rose worldwide by over one third from 1998 levels."

South Africa experienced 823 mergers and acquisitions in 2004, totaling $18,1 billion, an increase of 15.4% over the previous year. The number of public sector mergers also showed a very substantial increase internationally in the past decade (International Merger and Acquisition Summit 2003). South Africa, for example, has seen 843 local municipalities being merged into 284 local governments in 2000 (Xundu 2000), and 36 higher education institutions were merged or incorporated into 21 new institutions in the years 2004 and 2005 (Ministry of Education 2003; Vergnani 2001). In these examples alone, an estimated 180 000 employees were exposed to these types of transformations.

The numbers of mergers in the higher education sector in particular increased during recent decades (Kotecha/Harman 2001). In the words of Balmer and Dinnie (1999: 183), "Few sectors are immune to the wave of consolidation sweeping the global economy, impinging on both the private and public sectors." Schalk et al. (2001: 1) refer to these rapid and "unpredictable changes as a consequence of the globalization of markets, the intensificati...

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