How does culture matter when different companies merge together?

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: B-, University of Bedfordshire, course: MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, language: English, abstract: This report is written on the topic of 'How does Cultural Differences matter when the companies from different cultures merge together? The scope of this report is broad as it incorporates the implications of cultural differences in relation to the cross-border strategic alliance. Corporate Culture is used as term to signify how the managers and the workers of particular organisation tend to behave. Many international companies (Nestlè and Shell) have long term commitment towards cultural awareness and normally accepted it as an integral part of their international practices. Cultural clash and its bottom line influence are usually complicated and hard to predict. Frequently, failure to anticipate cultural clash originated from the senior managers and dealmakers lack of awareness. Understanding the prediction and mitigation of negative influence of cultural differences should be a part of cross-border alliances agenda for all management levels. From the case study chapter it has been figured out that most of American cultural traits have seemed to have direct clash with the Swedes culture which is characterised by certain aspects: modesty, values of relationship, caring and the quality of life. Both countries determined to have low power distance and high individualism but in US managemnt seemed to have slightly steeper management hierarchy than the Swedes management. Swedes ranked highlu in term of institutional collectivism but fairly low on small group or family collectivism. The vice versa case in Italian culture. Contrary to Americans, Italians are not much oriented towards performance or achievement and are turned up to be more emotional than American and Swedes and also have comparatively less future orientation. It has been recommended that Cultural differences is an impotant post-merger barrier for managers who are looking realise the value addition or the synergies impacr through the pooling of resource and capabilites of two firms from different cultures. Cultural clash and its bottom line influence are very often complicated and hard to predict. Frequently, failure to anticipate cultural clash originated from the senior managers and dealmakers lack of awareness. It has been seemed that the financial analyses which focuses only on the die-diligence process (Identifying cost-cutting benefits and counting up assets) tend to neglect any estimation on organisational and cultural synergy.