Merger and Acquisition Transition Plan

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 issues. We wanted to be up front so that we could reduce all misconceptions concerning the transition. Here, we told the employees when the merger was going to take place, when it was going to be announced to the public, and how it will effect our departments and them personally. We also let them know what we were expecting from them during and after this change.

Our committee chose to allow our individual departments to decide what steps would be essential to making this transition effective. Complying with the path-goal theory we told them what we would like to see happen and the direction in which the organization was aiming. Then we allowed them to brainstorm about the different areas that needed to be adjusted to achieve these goals. We supplied them with necessary information so that, with our assistance, they would have a hand in planning, organizing, and controlling certain decisions, empowering them so that we could obtain positive results. We understand the importance of giving them choices and to listening to their suggestions to improve the morale and the potential work conditions. Empowering the group helps them to thrive toward higher levels of achievement, while giving us another chance to solidify their trust that we will provide proper motivations and promote a work environment where they know their efforts and contributions will not go unrewarded.

As a result of the organizational restructuring that will happen in order to merge these two companies we were faced with having to let many employees go. Because we wanted to maintain our focuses on communication and empowerment, we had to think up a way to discreetly handle this situation where both parties came out with positive attitudes. After some thorough research we decided to adopt a strategy that promoted positive results for another company, PSE&G. When they were faced with a similar restructuring they decided that it would be better to reassign employees that were being laid off other