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Organizations deal with digital technologies to achieve their strategic goals. The shift toward digitization is a major challenge because it requires companies to create a digital outlook that influences organizational design. As a result, investigation of institutional theory and entrepreneurial orientation theory in the European food industry has become the focus of research in recent times.

To this end, data were collected from 83 companies related to the food industry in the European context. By applying a hybrid phase of the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods, this study captured the causal–non-linear relationships among the study constructs.

The findings revealed that the variables of institutional theory and entrepreneurial orientation theory affect the adoption of the digital strategy. There is also a dual interaction role for e-business capabilities and digital transformation. The results of non-linear relationships confirmed that digital strategy adoption is highly influenced by digital transformation, followed by risk-taking, digital leadership, e-business capabilities, organizational agility, proactiveness and innovativeness.

The authors provided significant implications for practitioners and academics about the most influential determinants of digital strategy – businesses must move swiftly toward digitization across its various units to achieve their objectives. An organization’s leadership must realize that equipping the employees with necessary skills is the first step toward digitalization.

The current study underscores the digital strategy, which is usually an overlooked area of investigation, in the food industry. The study identifies some important predictors of digital strategy adoption with the interaction’s role of digital transformation and e-business capabilities. Such relationships have been rarely discussed. In addition, the adoption of a hybrid SEM-AAN approach makes the study an original one.

Companies seek to increase the percentage of acquisitions in different parts of the world by expanding operations. Many companies are adopting strategic mergers to expand their influence. However, most strategic change programs fail to achieve their objectives. This study aims to investigate employees’ reactions after strategic mergers through the mediating role of the employees’ psychological context. It was necessary to identify the most prominent postmerger employees’ behaviors. The study addressed this gap by investigating the outcomes of strategic mergers.

Data for this study were collected from 30 family businesses. Accordingly, 341 questionnaires were collected with an overall response rate of 64%. The structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach and the nonlinear relationships approach were adopted by implementing artificial neural network (ANN) analysis.

The results confirm that there is a clear impact of strategic mergers on employees’ postmerger behavior because of the change at the hierarchical level and the process of distributing roles. Employees’ psychological context (individual incentives, anxiety and individual mobbing) mediates the relationship between strategic mergers and postmerger employees’ behavior. In addition, individual incentives are considered the main contributor to retaining or not retaining employees in family businesses after strategic merger.

Policymakers in organizations must pay attention to employees’ possible reactions to the internal and external policies of the organization by increasing individual incentives and reducing individual mobbing toward strategic merger. This study has theoretical implications that are critical guidelines for academics in mitigating the negative consequences for employees’ postmerger behavior. This study captured linear and nonlinear relationships to discover the determinants and antecedents of a strategic merger in family businesses. However, future studies should focus on using more robust statistical methods by adopting decision-making methods to determine the best and worst companies in terms of adopting strategic mergers.

The scarcity of literature on the most important determinants of postmerger employees’ behavior is considered an encouragement to conduct the current study. To this end, this study enriches the ongoing and future literature by examining the most important factors influencing the strategic merger of family businesses. Family businesses have changed the economic landscape of many countries. The investigation of the strategic merger of these companies is considered a worthy matter of study to improve the nation’s economy.