The business landscape has seen many a merger fall apart due to cultural conflicts between the merging companies. However, culture is not a closed compartment, rather it is an open system to which additions and deletions can be made to achieve the optimum balance and reap the benefits of the desired synergies.
Corporate culture is the common thread that binds people of different personalities together in an organization. It becomes so ingrained in the lives of the employees that they may find it difficult to cope with a different cultural milieu, when they move to a different company or their company encounters a cultural shift due to reasons like new vision, company expansion, new leadership or management or ownership, because of mergers or acquisitions, mass generational shifts in the employees, etc.
The predicament of the employees is stronger in cases of mergers and acquisitions, more so if the integrating companies are competitors (e.g. HP-Compaq, GTB-OBC, etc).Over the years, research has proven that cultural differences are the root cause for the failures of mergers, and these often eat up a major chunk of the resources of the integrating companies. Companies spend huge amounts of money, effort and time to seamlessly integrate their cultures. In the process, they may miss the competitive advantage, because while they are busy ironing out the cultural creases, their competitors might outpace them in the company-eat-company marketplace. |
