MERGING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURES

If one wants to have a strong Forced-growth corporate strategy that implies basically going for your competitor to achieve a:

- Merge: “Classified as a reorganization, in which one corporation absorbs the corporate structure of another, resulting in liquidation of the acquired enterprise. After this, only one company retains its identity.”1

1 Available at http://www.allbusiness.com/glossaries/merger/4944560-1.html

- Acquisition: It is when “one company takes over controlling interest in another company. “2

2 Available at http://www.telecomitalia.com/tit/en/corporate/investors/glossary.html

- Takeover: “Form of acquisition usually followed by a merger. It can be hostile or friendly. The public tender offer is a means of acquiring a target firm against the wishes of management.”3

3 Available at http://www.allbusiness.com/glossaries/takeover/4942168-1.html

http://www.mspmentor.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/msp-mergers-and-acquisitions.jpg

Now, resulting from the interaction of these merging, acquisition and takeover processes, the merging organisational cultures sees itself affected by all of these changes and tends to change, adapt or move to a better functionalism.

International Business professionals can play an active role in these processes, analysing and looking for strategies to minimise their impact on the Organisational culture. This has to do a lot with Change, and basically changing can attract reluctance if the changes are negative and acceptance if they are positive and good for the organization and its inner environment.

In the Case paper of “Challenges and opportunities in Mergers and Acquisitions: three international case studies- Deutsche Bank-Bankers trust; British Petroleum-Amoco; Ford-Volvo” by Salama, Holland and Vinten, basically they talk about the lessons learned after these processes and point at a very important fact which is the Acculturation process.

The Acculturation process is basically “a process in which members of one cultural group adopt the beliefs and behaviours of another group. Although Acculturation is usually in the direction of a minority group adopting habits and language patterns of the dominant group, acculturation can be reciprocal - that is, the dominant group also adopts patterns typical of the minority group. Assimilation of one cultural group into another may be evidenced by changes in language preference, adoption of common attitudes and values, members hip in common social groups and institutions, and loss of separate political or ethnic identification.”4

4 Available at http://www.rice.edu/projects/HispanicHealth/Acculturation.html

http://geriatrics.stanford.edu/ethnomed/latino/latino_images/latino_acculturation_cont.jpg

This goes not only for the corporate world, Acculturation is term derived from social studies and it also states that “there are several dimensions of Acculturation which include use of language, country of origin, length of residence, and contact with country of origin, parental expectations, and food preferences.”5

5 Available at http://geriatrics.stanford.edu/ethnomed/latino/fund/acculturation.html

Finally, it is the ones who actively enforce integrative responses to the process of merging and acquisition, which will make good and strong new corporate solutions for nowadays business.

People can react well to this if proper research and methodological approach is done to the merging process, this will reduce the impact of change in the Organisational culture.