Merger and Acquisition Transition Plan

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Merger and Acquisition Transition Plan

Today, we were called into the boss’s office and told that our company was about to go through a major restructuring. In two weeks, the organization will be merging with a national conglomerate and it is our job to get the “troops prepared”, as she put it. She stresses to us the importance of effective leadership and communication. She would like for us to establish and initiate a plan that will help the employees with the transition. Luckily for us, we just completed a seminar on organizational behavior and we know exactly what needs to be done to make this transition as positive and seamless as possible.

We held a meeting first thing the next morning to discuss the best way to approach the situation, keeping in mind that most of the staff will fear change but appreciate openness. We recognized that during this time there will be many different emotions and high stress, strong leadership and lots of understanding will play a substantial role in how smooth the transition will take place. Because many employee duties and positions will change, it is important for us to keep the group confident and motivated throughout this change. Since we are five different people, with five different leadership styles we decided that we should focus on the Path-Goal Theory to implement the transition. The path-goal theory states that leaders should make it as simple as possible for employees to reach their goals by helping them and reducing any obstacles that may arise.

There were a few reasons that we chose this particular theory but the most important one was that we felt it promotes open communication and individual empowerment. Communication and empowerment both help reduce the anxieties of change, which will hopefully allow our staff to go through the different phases of change without establishing any negative feeling towards the company, upper management, or even themselves.
After our meeting, we held a departmental meeting to inform the group about the changes that were about to occur and how we, as a department, were going to deal with them. We felt that being direct and open will make it easier for the staff to address any concerns they may have and we wanted them to hear the news from us first. We know that we have a responsibility to give them the facts and not try to minimize the impact of the news by hiding certain ...

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After the merger was announced and our plans were implemented, we went over the results and realized that we were able to pull of an almost seamless transition because of the pointers we received in our organizational behavior seminar. I can’t say that our changes went without conflict, conflict is inevitable, but our concentration on communication and empowerment caused our employees to not only trust in our decisions but it also let them know that we took pride in being fair and honest. The path-goal theory helped us to make the changes simple and reduce any obstacles that may arise. Acting quickly to provide the facts while understanding and dealing with their emotions and needs helped prevent an uproar of negative issues. Giving them the chance to voice their opinions and make their own decisions prevented them from feeling trapped and unimportant. During mergers, stress can be high and morale can be low, but if managers make use of effective leadership, remembering to include employees, the transition can be made much easier.

One piece of advice, make sure all of the managers in your company take learn about organization behavior, as you can see it helped us.

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