Merging org. cultures

When there is a merger between two companies, it can have its good and bad point. The reasons for a company to join in a merger may be to increase their capacity and financial resources and to reduce administrative costs, but in order for the merger to be successful there has to be a lot of commitment for both parties, the organizational leaders have to accept the people and the goals of a merger, there has to be a very open communication between both parties and open dialogue and feed-back between both parties, and the goals are settle based of free choice, it these points are ignored, the merger process will be difficult and long to complete and may eliminate all opportunities for the merger to be completed.
According to Deal and Kennedy, there are three impacts in a company from a merger

1. The over-your-shoulder effect

In this situation when there is a future merger, the employees don’t know what the changes that are going to happen in the future, there is a high uncertainty about the future regarding subjects such as budget, job and cost reductions, changes in organizational culture and department changes. One of the outcomes of a merger is that the company becomes more productive but it may reduce their currently working force, so it’s a very tiring situation for the employees and can reduce their task efficiency.

2. Winners-and-losers effect

In this situation the manager or leader tries to make the merge in a “winner” and “loser” situation, he put the company as the “winner” in this situation, there will be changes, but in favor of the company, in order to reduce the uncertainty in the employees he explain the merger as if they were the winners in the merger.

3. Cultural isolation effect

When there is going to be a merger, there is always going to be cultural changes that can affect a merger, even it the cultures are very similar in most aspect, there can still be small thing that are different between both parties, if there is going to be a merger, they have to take into account the national culture to make the merger be more easily affected and that the leaders understand and know how to in order to avoid collisions in the work place.

http://www.orgdct.com/mergers_and_organizational_cultu.htm