Corporate Leadership and the Working Environment: Relationships Among Organizational Leadership Factors in a Corporate Post-merger Working Environment

Abstract

This case study assessed actual corporate employees' perceptions of organizational health, or working environment, following a merger. The assessments in this research design evaluated the relationships between the organizational working environment, leadership factors, job performance factors, and overall factors in terms of their influences on corporate employees in a post-merger working environment. An additional goal was to develop and validate a modified survey instrument to measure employee perceptions of their pre- and post-merger working environments to support the research design. The survey developed for this study proved to be a very reliable instrument and worked well as a measurement instrument to assess employee perceptions of the pre- and post-merger working environments. Specifically the survey provided meaningful, actionable results to assess organizational change as result of a merger that potentially could be used for other corporate leaders wishing to improve the post-merger working environment.

These assessments supported addressing the overall questions of this study, which were to explore the impacts that a merger may have on the corporate working environment and to provide insights on how a merger works from the employee perspective. The results indicate that an organizational change in the form of a merger does affect employee perceptions about the health of the organization. In this particular case study, these differences are important because the employees perceive their current (post-merger) working environment less favorably than the pre-merger environment. The results specifically indicate that employee job performance may have been negatively affected by the merger, and the employees do not think they meet the needs of the customers, employees, or stockholders as well now as they did in the pre-merger environment. This study provides evidence that organizational leaders should take the pre-and post-merger leadership issues seriously if they hope to improve the post-merger health of their organizations.

This study builds on previous organizational leadership research by focusing on an actual corporate organization that recently merged with a substantially larger organization. The study assessed the existing organizational working environment and leadership theory within the context an actual event. The study contributes to the field by demonstrating the relationship between key organizational leadership factors, as defined by current organizational leadership theory, and the influence of those factors on the corporate post-merger working environment.