A coalition collision : A case study on organisational alterations

Abstract: When companies go trough a merger or an acquisition all involved parties within the organisations becomes affected. These changes can affect the company in many areas which could create tensions and anxiety among employees which could create strong negative forces at the end and prevent the new organisation to function at its best. In service companies this could be of great importance to overcome since they often are dependent on functional organisations to help them create a wanted quality. This study will address this problem and will do so in a case study performed on a transportations company which have gone trough a number of mergers. Due to these mergers, the company has also grown in both numbers of employees and in financial conditions. The applied thesis statement is: “How should a small expanding company manage the integration of acquired companies and at the same time maintain a sought identity within the organisation, in order to reach their main strategic objectives? “. The ambition is to be able to understand how the studied company has developed and also to analyse its organisational transition. Furthermore we also want to create proposals for organisations that are facing future organisational transitions, based from our findings in this study. This study has been conducted with a hermeneutic scientific ideal and an abductive approach. The empirical collection was done inside the studied organisation in a qualitative manner. We conducted nine interviews, one with the manager (co-owner) and the other eight with employees inside the company. We wanted to be able to see both parties’ sides of the mergers. Therefore the interviews where conducted at two separate offices in different cities. The theoretical framework consists of a number of theoretical areas, who together creates a holistic view over the entire research area. The theoretical parts consist of: Organisation, network, mergers, acquisitions, family firms, corporate culture, identity, social identity, service quality and Human Resources. Our main conclusion is of the studied company shows that the biggest problem which the organisation faces today is the lack of communication between the manager and the employees. Although we claim that the merger has played a mayor impact on the company in many areas. Some of the main difficulties which we identified were the fact that the merger never was discussed thoroughly between the management and the employees. We also claim that the company when divided between the two offices have created a cultural gap between the wanted culture and the actual culture. We argue that the quality thinking permeates trough the entire organisation and all of the respondents have described the importance of achieving a high quality service within the organisation.