Me, You or We: Influencing ‘belonging’ in the long-term post acquisition integration of ‘acquired’ retail front-line employees.

Marketing, strategy and psychology academic disciplines converge in the assessment of what factors lead to the long-term success of one organisation acquiring another. Within retail organisations, the integration of front-line employees (FLEs) is central to an acquisitions success. FLEs work with customers to co-create a mutual sense of satisfaction and value (Vargo and Lusch, 2016). Successful integration is dependent on FLEs from both the acquired and acquiring organisation holding a strong sense of belonging (Sung, Woehler, Fagan, Grosser, Floyd and Labianca, 2017) Here, FLEs internalise cues that are both internal and external to the acquiring organisation to inform the strength of their sense of belonging (Meyer, Becker & van Dick, 2006; Tourky, Syed Alwi, Kitchen, Melawar and Shaalan, 2019).