In this instance, the stronger culture can easily consumer the lesser culture. Employees tend to be more receptive due primarily to the lack of culture and also by the prestige and power of the acquiring firm. Assimilation often occurs will smaller, less established companies being acquired by much larger competitors. As the company is just beginning to emerge, many culture qualities have not become entrenched. Assimilation however, is very rare in the context of mergers.
What is a more common strategy is that of deculturation. This is due primarily to the fact that employees usually resist organizational change, particularly when they are asked to throw away personal and cultural values. Under these conditions, some acquiring companies apply a deculturation strategy by imposing their culture and business practices on the acquired organization. The acquiring firm strips away artifacts and reward systems that support the old culture. People who cannot adopt the acquiring company's culture are often terminated. This strategy can be particularly troublesome as it creates factions within the organization. These factions often possess talented personnel who otherwise would contribute mightily to the organization. However, due to their overall disdain for the new company they are unmotivated and unproductive. This causes problems as company and employee moral is significantly diminished within the organization. In addition, as the company attempts to impose its own values on the organization, many of the older individuals tend to move to competitors, causing competitive disadvantages.
A third strategy and arguable most effective strategy, is to simply integrate the corporate cultures of both organizations. This strategy involves combining the two or more cultures into a new composite culture that preserves the best features of the previous cultures. When company cultures include several overlapping values this strategy is the most effective. Integration also works best when people realize that their existing cultures are ineffective and are therefore motivated to adopt a new set of dominant values. Integration also works well in terms of merger related costs. If both companies are already similar in both industry and values, integration will occur in a much more seamless fashion. If not however, the...
This strategy is most appropriate when the two merging companies are in unrelated industries or operate in different countries, because the most appropriate cultural values tend to differ by industry and national culture. This strategy could fail as the unified company now must allocate resources to two distinct parties. If the company doesn't have a unified culture it may allocate funds based on bias and personal preference. This could cause animosity and angst between the two distinct companies.
Leaders can strength culture in four primary ways. These methods include control, sense making, expectation setting, and incentives. In regards to control, leaders can control the personnel that enter the company who exhibit certain cultural qualities. In regards to hiring perspective candidates, only those candidates that exhibit the cultural values of the organization will be hired. This allows the leader to obtain the right personnel for the correct job, while also controlling the manner in which the culture develops. Through sense making, leaders can appeal to employee ability to rationalize information. In this sense, leaders can explain, in common terms, why a particular culture makes sense in the context of the underlying business operation of the firm. Leaders can also use expectation setting as a means of moving the culture forward in an organization. Through expectation setting, the leader provides clear-cut metrics of behavior and attitude. In this instance, all personnel within the organization will have a grasp of what leadership and management expect of them. Finally, rewarding behaviors that exhibit the cultural attributes management wants to uphold is critical. By providing rewards, it encourages individuals to act a certain way. Through incentives, the culture of an organization can be quickly adopted.
Profit= Innovation
ORGANIC
Flexibility
External Focus
Profit=Rule
Bureaucracy MECHANISTIC
Profit= Relationship
Profit= Competition
Control
Internal Focus
