Every deal team plans the systems migration in careful waves - audits, testing, a named completion date. Nobody plans the ownership migration. Legal ownership transfers the day the deal completes; the feeling that a team, a product or a way of working is mine transfers slowly, or not at all.
Most integration failure stories are told through culture clash, resistance or attrition statistics. My thesis asked a more specific question underneath those: what actually happens to psychological ownership during an acquisition, and could integration be designed around it, the way it is already designed around systems?
The evidence base is practitioner testimony, gathered under Imperial ethics approval. I recruited interviewees without an existing network in M&A and built a sample spanning different positions around the deal: founders and senior leaders who had sold businesses, employees who had experienced acquisition, and senior practitioners who had advised on or run integrations. Collectively, the participants' experience covered more than a hundred acquisitions.
Interviews were semi-structured and conducted in English and Spanish. Working bilingually widened the sample and allowed Spanish-speaking participants to describe their experience directly rather than through translated interview questions.
I analysed the material using theory-informed template analysis: an initial coding structure derived from the psychological-ownership literature, revised through successive passes against the interview data and extended with themes that emerged inductively. The point was not to make the transcripts fit the theory, but to use theory as a starting structure and change that structure where the evidence demanded it.
One finding organised much of what followed: people don't just respond to the narrative; they read the touch-points.
Leadership can repeat that little will change, but employees continue updating their beliefs as operational decisions land. A reporting line changes. A system disappears. A familiar process is replaced. The logo on a badge changes, or the name on a payslip. These apparently ordinary touch-points become evidence about who now has control, what still belongs to whom and which parts of the old organisation are expected to survive.
The second finding was that ownership threat was not simply an “acquired-side problem”. What mattered was whose practices, identities and areas of control became dominant after combination. Acquired employees often faced the clearest disruption, but acquiring-side employees could also experience threat when their own practices were displaced.
The ownership journey also changed radically depending on where someone sat. A founder's ownership could be explicit, identity-laden and negotiated. A broad-base employee's could be embedded in routines, teams and ways of working they had never previously needed to name. Treating both groups as one generic “employee population” risks missing the mechanism entirely.
I didn't want the output to stop at a discussion chapter, so I translated the research into tools an integration practitioner could use.
Four stakeholder ownership journeys mapped how psychological ownership could shift across the acquisition timeline for acquired senior leaders, acquired employees, acquiring integration leaders and the acquiring incumbent population. Each journey identified changing ownership targets, threat points and the signals likely to matter at different stages.
A stage-anchored framework of 21 decision points and 30 actions translated those diagnoses into practice. Actions were organised around the routes through which psychological ownership develops (knowing, control and self-investment) and tied to particular moments in the deal rather than presented as a generic list of “people” recommendations.
The purpose was to move from advice like communicate clearly or involve employees to more diagnostic questions: what do people currently feel ownership over, what is threatening it, which route to ownership has been disrupted, and what operational touchpoint could change that?
The framework went through seven iterations before structured practitioner appraisal.
Different versions were challenged through interviews and written feedback, and the frozen final summary was then appraised by a panel of practitioners across dimensions including validity, usefulness, usability and likelihood of adoption. Across the final appraisal, 90% of responses were agreement or strong agreement.
I treat that as directional evidence of practitioner plausibility, not proof of effectiveness.
A group of experienced practitioners judging the framework credible and usable matters because they are close to the context in which it would operate. But appraisal is not an outcome study. Demonstrating effectiveness would require applying the framework during a live integration and measuring psychological ownership around actual interventions and touch-points as they occur, rather than reconstructing the process retrospectively.
That is the next study this work points toward, and the boundary of what this thesis claims.
© 2026 by Nicole Stott