Assignment: Organizational Mergers
In order to talk about organizational merge, it is helpful to define the organizational changes firstly. There are a lot of researches about organizational changes. Bartunek and Moch (1987), for instance, identified organizational changes into three degrees according to the intensity. It is based on members’ schemas for understanding organizational events. There are first-order change, which involves incremental changes to shared schemas (e.g., adopting new routines); second-order change, involves substantive modifications of shared schemas (e.g., implementing a new strategic vision); and third-order change, involves acute alterations to or replacement of existing shared schemas (e.g., during disturbing events like bankruptcies or radical changes such as mergers and acquisitions). Thus, merger is a form of organizational change, and it brings alternative or replace shared schemas of members in the organization.
Consider all the three types of organizational changes, organizational merger is unique, but there is one elemental among all these different changes of organization which is noticeable, organizational identity. It is an essential topic in organizational changes. It answers the question “who are we as an organization?” It describes what is central, distinctive, and continuous over time about the organization.
Over the last quarter century, organizational identity has burgeoned as both a topic of interest and a key concept in organization study and has been linked to a variety of important phenomena (Clark, Gioia, Ketchen, and Thomas, 2010). According to their paper “Transitional Identity as a Facilitator of Organizational Identity Change during a Merger”, they analyzed that the transitional identity allowed managers in the organizations to suspend their preexisting organizational identities and work toward creating a