합병주체기업과 피합병기업의 조직에 대한 태도

Organizational commitment is an essential elements in the process of psychological unification after M&A (Buono & Bowditch, 2003). The organizational commitment, which means identification, membership, and willingness, can be a criterion to evaluate the degree of psychological unification among groups. In order to measure the success of organizational unification, researches must be focused not only on legal unification among firms but also on psychological unifications of the employees from different firms The purpose of this study is to investigate differences in employees' organizational commitments between bidder and target firms and to compare patterns of determinants of organizational commitment between them. A big firm in the automobile industry was chosen for this study. Prior to M&A, there were originally 3 firms. After a firm as bidder merged the others as target firms, a new unified firm M was established. Even though the new firm M was unified officially, internal organizational conflicts still existed after M&A. The contract condition of M&A, which M should endorse and keep three different unions, confined the organizational unification. For example, the three labor unions had their own collective bargaining against the unified company on HRM systems and practices, which could hinder complete unification. Authors think that the unified company M is a good subject to study employees' attitudes after M&A. Three hypotheses are made for this exploratory research. The first hypothesis is that the employees' attitudes of a merger group (bidder) will be different from those of merged groups (target) in a new unified firm. Results show that no independent variables are statistically different among three groups (bidder and targets) except one variable, benefit satisfaction. However, using regression analysis with dummy variables to investigate the differences of organizational commitment levels among three groups, this research shows that the level is significantly lower in the target firm than in the bidder. The second is that the variables related with human resource management and organizational management will have the same effects on the employess' commitments to the company in the unified firm.. This study shows that empowerment, vision sharing, and upward communication are the determinants of organizational commitment for the unified firm. The last is that after M&A, patterns of determinants for employees' organizational commitment are the same in all three groups (bidder and target). Even though the criteria is not strictly clear, the result shows the different patterns among three groups. The acceptance and rejection of the third hypothesis may not be very important. It is expected that this hypothesis can suggest a direction for exploratory research for the real organizational unification. Generally, a new unified firm may suffer from organizational conflicts during first few years after M&A. This research on employees' attitudes and perceptions in M&A can help CEOs and HR practitioners lessen organizational conflicts and manage an organizational unification successfully.