Managing Organisational Culture during Mergers and Acquisition

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) despite being identified as risky remain a strategy of choice for chief executives of organisations. Rates of failure have been reported to be as high as between 52 to 70% of M&As failing to deliver their intended benefits and maintain shareholder value. These high failure rates are increasingly being blamed on organisational culture issues. Organisational culture however has been described as a rich but complex and confusing field with very different albeit often overlapping typologies (Wilson 2005). This book argues theoretically from a functionalism view of culture and investigates empirically methods of diagnosing and managing culture associated with successful M&As. The writer discovered that despite culture receiving a higher degree of visibility in recent times; it is still far from being a well-understood concept with a coherent methodology for diagnosing or managing it during M&As.