Organization and Behavior

Organizational Behavior

Project Report

“A Case Study

On

Merger and Acquisition”

By

Payal Mathur, Ankita Sethi, Luiz Geroni, Kingsley Oguchi,

Taehyun Kim and John Beard

(Team 6)

1. Introduction and Organizational Context

We chose the topic of Merger and Acquisition as they are very relevant and prevalent in the current time. Still, acquisitions are tricky. Corporate cultures need to mesh, as do revenue and expense synergies. While CEO's often see themselves as empire builders looking to grow their companies by any means necessary, the reality is that successful acquisitions that really help companies long-term are in the minority.

There are many factors involved during M&A such as: volume and valuation, growth, TMT convergence, talent management, business transformation to name a few. According to our case study one of the most important aspects that we believe during this process is leadership and change management but at the same time it is also very important to emphasize on employee satisfaction. Of course, there are conflicts during any such big change and there will be instances that require tough decisions on part of leaders but an important thing during this change is to focus on the big picture.

The company chosen for our case study will be referred as Company A and Company B hereafter:

Company A: It is a big firm of about 1800 employees. They started out by reselling technology products and gradually made their presence in commercial ranging from Finance, Healthcare, media etc. and government domains ranging from security to big data analysis. Their goal behind acquisition as stated by their CEO is: “We want to be the world’s largest pure-play integrated mobile enterprise solutions company”. Acquiring Company B would help them expand into mobile commerce and omnichannel commerce would be the way of the future.

Company B: It is a fairly small company, has only around 90 employees in offices located near Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. and about $15 million in annual revenue. It is niche, focused and specific in retail e-commerce solution field. They have grown quickly in the last 5 years with 100 Oracle Commerce projects delivered. Merging with Company A gives them the ability to deliver strategy, user experience, big data analytics, mobile device management which is important to their clients down the road. 

2. Exploration of Organizational Behavior Dimensions

2.1 Leadership

Company B has faced a revolution while the acquisition process was happening. Leaders had key roles to keep teams motivated and successfully complete the process. “Leadership is the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of goals.” But how did leaders from Company B influence their teams? What were the main activities? What were the challenges? These points will be explored below.

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Source: MBA Katz, Organizational Behavior Course, Professor Nisha Nair