Discussion on the role and process of identity change within a merger
The journal
Administrative Science Quarterly is an esteemed academic journal held and run by the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management of Cornell University.
It was founded in 1956 and in 2007 climbed the Financial Times’ ranking of academic journals in business reaching the 16th position ("Financial Times Top Academic Journals in the Business", Financial Times, 2007), just to mention one of the successes that ensured the journal a remarkable reputation.
The quarterly mainly deals with organizational issues and researches of well-known scholars, but also tries to open its horizons to new perspectives by publishing studies of young emerging scholars with fresh viewpoints
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The case was assigned and presented during a seminar of the course, it deals with the merger of Tarco company with its two supplier manufactures. As for Company and Westbrook, the merger was a strategy to reduce costs and gain strategic advantage over rivals in the marketplace. In the case of Tarco, the culture of the three organizations and their identities were overlooked and totally ignored and the merger was simply considered a legal procedure. Therefore, after the legal birth of the new unified company, each component continued to act as independent, this had impacts on performance and productivity and brought to delayed deliveries and customer dissatisfaction. When these problems emerged, managers made many attempts to find a solution, but at a deeper look became clear that the main cause of the bad-functioning was a lack of identification of the three merged organizations in the new one. The absence of a common culture led everyone to move toward different directions. This proves the importance of transitional identity or adaptive culture when a major change happens in order to ensure the success of the new