Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

DIFFICULT EVENTS TO MANAGE

To be fair, mergers and acquisitions are difficult events to manage. The very manner in which they are enacted runs counter to research findings on the process of effective organizational change management and prescriptions of effective leadership and management (Marks & Mirvis, 1998). For example, various organizational change management models give a prominent role to vision as a prerequisite for success (Kanter, Stein, & Jick, 1992; Lipton, 1996). However, many combinations are done for purely cost-cutting reasons, for example, when two underutilized hospitals in a community combine or when financial institutions join forces and eliminate redundant back-office functions. Often, mergers and acquisitions are reactive ...