Integrating Relative Standing and Market discipline: A complexity theory perspective of post-merger and acquisition executive departure

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) typically accelerate target top management team (TMT) executive departures. Market discipline and Relative Standing are two major and competing economic and sociological explanations for this phenomenon which lack a satisfactory theoretical integration. To fill this gap in the literature, we model the M&A market as a complex adaptive system composed of TMTs which rid themselves of executives via self-organized critical processes, generating M&A market-level properties that are emergent, or not easily explained with reference to the individual TMTs. The observation of an emergent power law distribution in target TMT executive retention rates for M&A activities in the United States supports our interpretation.