CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

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Social Identification Processes,
Conflict, and Fairness Concerns
in Intergroup Mergers
DeBorah J. terry
university of queensland
Catherine e. aMiot
université du québec à Montréal
Since the beginning of the 1990s, organizational mergers have been
implemented throughout the world with the aim of improving organizations’
effectiveness and competitiveness in the global economy (Daly,
Pouder, & Kabanoff, 2004). Most organizational changes create stress and
job insecurity, but organizational mergers represent a particularly stressful
kind of change, given the large-scale nature of this change, as well
as the fact that employees must relinquish an identity that was previously
important to them (their premerger organization) and shift their
allegiance to the newly merged organization (Cartwright & Cooper, 1992;
Nadler & Tushman, 1989). To account for the fact that between 60% and
70% of mergers fail to achieve their economic aims (Devoge & Shiraki,
2000; Gunders & Alpert, 2001; KPMG, 2001), commentators have proposed
that relying on a strictly economical point of view is unlikely to provide
insights into why mergers so often fail. In fact, some researchers have proposed
that there is much unexplained variance in predicting why mergers
fail or succeed (Hitt, Ireland, & Harrison, 2001), and that human factors
need to be taken into consideration to understand what goes on during
organizational mergers (Cartwright & Cooper, 1992).
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