Surviving Mergers and Acquisitions: Post-merger Impact on Organizational Identification

Abstract

Like many companies that are interested in growing their business, creating value, and maximizing efficiencies, leaders from Chicago Child Care Society and Family Focus sought an opportunity to merge together to create one powerful entity. Family Focus, the new entity, hopes to successfully integrate while ensuring the staff is highly productive, actively engaged and fully committed to the new organization. The purpose of this study is to understand how employees are faring with the merger and what challenges employees are facing during the post-merger integration phase. This capstone project took a qualitative approach to gain insight into employees’ experiences, thoughts, and opinions regarding the merger. Findings from this research revealed employees’ desire for clarity in terms of how each organization will fit into the new structure and the uncertainty they are feeling about new roles, responsibilities, and the reporting structure. The findings also reveal a path to victory in terms of strengthening employees’ organizational identification with the new entity. Although they have deep organizational identification with their pre-merger organization, employees recognize the strong synergies, alignment in missions and the value and benefits as one powerful unit.