Published April 2003
| Published
Journal Article
Open
Cultural Conflict and Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach
- Creators
- Weber, Roberto A.
-
Camerer, Colin F.
Abstract
We use laboratory experiments to explore merger failure due to conflicting organizational cultures. We introduce a laboratory paradigm for studying organizational culture that captures several key elements of the phenomenon. In our experiments, we allow subjects in "firms" to develop a culture, and then merge two firms. As expected, performance decreases following the merging of two laboratory firms. In addition, subjects overestimate the performance of the merged firm and attribute the decrease in performance to members of the other firm rather than to situational difficulties created by conflicting culture.
Additional Information
© 2003 INFORMS. Accepted by Linda Argote, Bill McEvily, and Ray Reagans; received March 1, 2001. This paper was with the authors 9 months for 2 revisions. The authors thank participants at the 2000 Behavioral Decision Research in Management meetings in Tucson, Arizona; the 2000 Economic Science Association meetings in New York, New York; the 2001 Carnegie-Bosch conference on Managing Knowledge in Organizations, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the 2002 Conference on Behavioral Learning and Bounded Rationality in Aix-en-Provence, France; and seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard Business School, and the University of Pittsburgh for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant #SES-0095570. Thanks also to Dan Clendenning and Jason Dana for research assistance. This work has benefited greatly from the authors' discussions with Linda Argote, Linda Babcock, Paul Fischbeck. Chip Heath, Herb Simon, and George Loewenstein, and from the three anonymous reviewers.Attached Files
Published - mgtsci03_1_.pdf
Published - ssrn-id276288_1_.pdf
Files
mgtsci03_1_.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 22042
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110207-095930114
- SES-0095570
- NSF
- Created
-
2011-10-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Other Numbering System Name
- USC Center for Law, Economics & Organization Research Paper
- Other Numbering System Identifier
- C01-10