Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Case Study Module 2
Case Study Module 2
Finally, employees should also be forgiving. They need to allow management some
leeway in making mistakes and not ax-grind on every little problem that pops up.
4. The second merger discussed in this case study did not result in a
positive change experience. What could organizational leaders have
done differently to ensure a more positive outcome?
Generally, the communication surrounding the second merger was horrid. Before
the merger even happened, there were secret meetings that left employees in the
dark and after the first talks failed, employees received information on the merger
failure from news reports. In addition, the National Sales Manager with PS bad
mouthed the merger with U idea as bad idea due to massively different corporate
cultures. A better path would have been to openly communicate their intentions.
Knowing that the companies had a competitive history, organizational leaders
should have agreed to a friendly truce to not talk badly thus resulting in employee
unease.
In addition to bad communication there was no solid, combined plan for the merger,
nor did they express combined culture as a goal. Each company had its own merger
team. Several of PS key leaders quit, probably due to this lack of planning and
foresight. A combined transition team and stated cultural goals could have gone a
long way to rectifying this issue. With a little bit of pre-merger research they might
have foreseen the key leaders resigning and at least tried to prevent it with good
retention packages.
Next, they failed on the name. Eliminating S from the name alienated those who
had come from S. An easy way to prevent just such an issue would have been to
poll employees on what the new name should be, or even opinions on differing
name options. This would have made employees feel that their opinions matter and
that, even though the merger, they are important to the company.
Finally, everything seemed to be focused on how nothing would change.
Management focused on telling employees that nothing would change. This
resulted in an inability to integrate operations. By keeping everything separated,
culture naturally was included and probably caused ill will among the two
companys employees. Management should have made a plan for and been
promoting a combined new culture (as they did with the first merger).