Cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions : Employee Engagement in Post-merger Integration

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) has been a popular strategy to strengthen business competitive-ness since the nineteenth century. Moreover, this trending phenomenon has led M&A to become a popular research topic in the past decades. However, research has typically been dominated by the financial aspects of M&A cases, nor did the M&A success rate improve with the support of robust research findings. In a globalized business world, a growing number of M&A cases are happening in a cross-border setting, but little is known about the role of the human side in its success. Therefore, the thesis focused on the human side of cross-border M&A during post-merger integration (PMI). This thesis aims to provide a better understanding of how employee engagement enhances cross-border post-merger integration and thus improves M&A success rate. With the help of the existing theory of JD-R model, this thesis proposed an adapted model, assuming that there are a few job resources and job demands affecting employee engagement during a cross-border PMI. Through qualitative research and a method of conducting semi-structured interviews with six participants who have experienced cross-border PMI, this social phenomenon was investigated at depth in a natural setting. The research findings show that there are a few elements affecting employee engagement dur-ing a cross-border PMI. However, these elements should not simply be defined as resources or demands due to the duality of them. Therefore, the concluded adapted JD-R model demon-strates that, career growth and training opportunities, salary and compensation level, business efficiency, new organizational culture, team culture and personal factors can affect employee engagement during a cross-border PMI positively or negatively according to the employee’s situ-ation and their way of perceiving changes. This thesis gives insight into human issues in complex organizational changes. The research find-ings strongly point towards facilitating the changes from a human resource perspective behind cross-border M&A success

Attribute Selection Methods in Rough Set Theory

Attribute selection for rough sets is an NP-hard problem, in which fast heuristic algorithms are needed to find reducts. In this project, two reduct methods for rough set were implemented: particle swarm optimization and Johnson’s method. Both algorithms were evaluated with five different benchmarks from the KEEL repository. The results obtained from both implementations were compared with results obtained by the ROSETTA software using the same benchmarks. The results show that the implementations achieve better correction rates than ROSETTA

The influence of innovation strategy on enterprise: a pedagogical case study of Lego

Toys are an indispensable partner in the growth of children, which can give children boundless joy. Toys can not only satisfy children's playful nature, but also be an important tool to cultivate children's good intelligence and healthy psychology. The growth of the toy industry has given rise to big toy companies such as Lego, Hasbro and Mattel. With the progress of the Internet and the development of electronic games, the traditional toy industry has been impacted to some extent. In 2019, in 13 major markets around the world toy sales fell by 3%, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France and the United States have all seen sales decline and even closed large retail stores in 2019. In the face of the current depressed market situation in the toy industry, Lego Group, on the contrary, has achieved sustained profits. Recent data show that Lego saw significant growth in both sales and profits in the first half of 2020, reporting a 14% rise in sales and a 7% surge in revenues. The purpose of this paper is to provide a pedagogical case study on the Lego company to the audience – management undergraduate students. The case allows students to apply important strategic tools like Porter's Five Forces model and the VRIO model, and concepts related to innovation and ambidexterity to the case, in order to combine theory with practice, which is hoped will have a positive impact on their understanding of the matters and ability to apply the concepts in new settings.Um brinquedo é um parceiro indispensável para o crescimento de uma criança e pode dar-lhe prazer ilimitado. Os brinquedos não só satisfazem a natureza lúdicas das crianças, mas também são uma ferramenta importante para desenvolver a sua inteligência e uma mente sã. O desenvolvimento da indústria dos brinquedos deu origem a grandes empresas de brinquedos, como a Lego, a Hasbro e a Mattel. Com o avanço da internet e o desenvolvimento dos jogos de vídeo, a indústria tradicional de brinquedos sofreu um impacto. Em 2019, as vendas em 13 dos principais mercados mundiais de brinquedos diminuíam 3%. Na Austrália, Bélgica, Brasil e Canadá registaram-se quebras de vendas e viram-se fechar grandes lojas retalhistas. Face à atual situação do mercado dos brinquedos, o grupo Lego conseguiu manter a sua rentabilidade. Os dados mais recentes mostram que a Lego teve um crescimento significativo nas vendas e nos lucros no primeiro semestre de 2020, com um aumento de 14% nas vendas e de 7% nas receitas. O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar um estudo de caso pedagógico sobre o grupo Lego ao público alvo - estudantes de licenciatura na área da Gestão. O caso permite aos estudantes a aplicação de ferramentas estratégicas importantes na gestão, como o modelo das cinco forças de Porter e o modelo VRIO, e a integração de conceitos relacionados com a inovação e a ambidestria; que se espera tenham um impacto positivo no seu entendimento destas matérias e na sua capacidade de as aplicar noutros contextos

First Observational Signature of Rotational Deceleration in a Massive, Intermediate-age Star Cluster in the Magellanic Clouds

While the extended main-sequence turn-offs (eMSTOs) found in almost all 1--2 Gyr-old star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds are often explained by postulating extended star-formation histories, the tight subgiant branches (SGBs) seen in some clusters challenge this popular scenario. Puzzlingly, the SGB of the eMSTO cluster NGC 419 is significantly broader at bluer than at redder colors. We carefully assess and confirm the reality of this observational trend. If we would assume that the widths of the features in color--magnitude space were entirely owing to a range in stellar ages, the star-formation histories of the eMSTO stars and the blue SGB region would be significantly more prolonged than that of the red part of the SGB. This cannot be explained by assuming an internal age spread. We show that rotational deceleration of a population of rapidly rotating stars, a currently hotly debated alternative scenario, naturally explains the observed trend along the SGB. Our analysis shows that a `converging' SGB could be produced if the cluster is mostly composed of rapidly rotating stars that slow down over time owing to the conservation of angular momentum during their evolutionary expansion from main-sequence turn-off stars to red giants.Comment: 11 pages, preprint format (uses aastex6.cls); ApJ Letters, in pres

High efficiency III/V thin film solar cells : light trapping, antireflection, and band structure engineering

textPhoton management via submicron and subwavelength nanostructures has been extensively studied over the last decade, and has become one of the most important approaches of boosting the energy conversion efficiency for thin-film photovoltaic devices. The incorporation of low dimensional nanostructures, such as GaAs/InGaAs quantum wells, into typical GaAs single-junction cells will extend the cell absorption further into the sub-GaAs bandgap region but usually results in reduced cell open-circuit voltage. As a consequence, various bandgap engineering techniques for improving the energy conversion efficiency for quantum well solar cells have been reported. This dissertation will describe studies of light trapping in multiple GaAs/InGaAs quantum well solar cells via nanostructured front side dielectric coating and back side metal/dielectric contacts, photovoltaic performance enhancement for bulk and flexible thin-film GaAs solar cells through subwavelength nanostructured antireflection coating, and bandgap engineering techniques for GaAs/InGaAs multiple quantum well solar cells. In the study of nanostructured dielectric antireflection coatings, a 5.8% increase in short-circuit current density is observed for the GaAs/In₀.₃Ga₀.₇As multiple quantum well cell coated with TiO₂ nanostructured coating compared to the cell coated with conventional Si₃N₄ single-layer antireflection coating even in the presence of high surface recombination. Numerical simulation shows that as high as 13% increase in short-circuit current density can be achieved without surface recombination. In the study of GaAs/In₀.₃Ga₀.₇As multiple quantum well solar cells integrated with nanostructured back side metal/dielectric contacts, as high as 2.9% per quantum well external quantum efficiency is achieved, significantly surpassing the 1% per quantum well external quantum efficiency typically observed in quantum well solar cells. In both studies, two major mechanisms contributing to the increased longer wavelength quantum well absorption have been elucidated: Fabry-Perot resonances and scattering into guided optical modes. In application of subwavelength-scale optical nanostructures on bulk and flexible epitaxial lift-off GaAs solar cells for broadband, omnidirectional improvement of photovoltaic performance, 1.1× increase in short-circuit current density is observed for the bulk GaAs cell fully integrated with optical nanostructures compared to the unpatterned cell (1.09× increase in short-circuit current density for flexible epitaxial lift-off GaAs cell) at normal incidence, while 1.67× increase in short-circuit current density is observed (1.52× increase in short-circuit current density is observed for flexible epitaxial lift-off GaAs cell) at 80° angle of incidence. In the study of bandgap engineering strategies for improving the photovoltaic performance for GaAs/InGaAs multiple quantum well solar cells, a quantum well solar cell with graded quantum well depths, which has an average 18% indium concentration in quantum wells, is shown to yield improvements in both open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current density compared to a GaAs/In₀.₁₈Ga₀.₈₂As quantum well solar cell with constant quantum well depths across the intrinsic region. The results of this study suggest that such an approach can also be implemented in quantum well solar cells with more complex quantum well structures, such as ternary or quaternary quantum wells, where the conduction and valence band offsets of each quantum well can be simultaneously engineered.Electrical and Computer Engineerin