The purpose of this research is to examine employee resilience in post-M&A contexts. However, the impact of M&As on employees and their capacities to cope with the demands and pressures M&As is largely ignored by managers and under-researched empirically. This study builds on existing M&A research to develop a theoretical model that conceptualises and examines the antecedents of employee resilience, largely conceptualised in terms of employee emotions, in M&As, and how it impacts on post-M&A integration effectiveness and performance.

The theoretical model underpinning this thesis was examined using a quantitative cross-sectional research design. To test the model, a survey was designed and data was collected from 156 executives who were involved in M&As between 2009 and 2019. Several hypotheses were developed and were, in turn, empirically tested via structural equation modelling using Smart PLS 3.3 and SPSS Process Macro.

The key findings show a significant negative effect of employee resilience on the integration effectiveness of M&As. The study goes further to identify three emotions that can affect employee resilience, including emotional attending, feeling of dissatisfaction and insecurity. Results from this study indicate that all three emotions are negatively related to employee resilience. Particularly, in the context of post-M&A integration, the emotional attending and feeling of insecurity are negatively related to the integration approaches, while the emotional attending is noted to be most important for integration speed. Further, the results also indicate that the integration approaches characterised with low levels of autonomy can improve integration effectiveness, but there is no evidence that integration speed affects integration effectiveness.

These empirical findings provide important insights and advance our understanding of employees’ ability to cope with the pressures of post-M&As integration processes and the impact of employees’ resilience on post-M&A performance. It provides new directions to future research on employee resilience in the post-M&A contexts.