Integrating cultures
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The cultures will necessary change during the integration, not only in the acquired company but also in the acquirer.
From your experience how dramatical can this impact the overall NewCo, can this generate a complete new organizational culture, values, etc.Integration can generate a new culture if there is willingness and flexibility to learn from the others. Depending how close the targets work together and geographical distance between the target and acquirer, I have observed that sometimes letting the 2 different cultures run in parallel can be a more successful strategy than integration or adjustment.
I do agree that letting two cultures run parallel for a certain time, or aspects of a subculture for longer, will work well – it gives the employees of the acquired company something ‘old’ to hold one to, making the transition less stressful, or appearing less stressful.
Strong subcultures or values, though, should be targeted to be integrated at some point; thus even before going into M&A conversations the buyer should have a clear vision of which subcultures they want the target to ‘take over’, think of strong values like continuous improvement, a learning organization, respect for the individual etc.I believe that it will really depend on how strong the cultures are in the two existing companies, if an older well-established company acquires a new start up it is very likely that the startup culture will morph to follow the stronger well-established cultures of the acquiring company.
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