4.2 Social versus personal identity

Before getting into the details it is worth recalling that social identity is the level of relatedness between one individual and the group of individuals. It is something that links us to the social world (Makri, 2012, p.115). Therefore, employee identity - is a personal identity of particular worker, a set of characteristics that distinguish him from other co-workers (van Dick, p.5).

Post-merger stage of M&A process is the most stressful for employees, because any changes leads to uncertainty and stress. Employees usually tend to express negative attitude toward the organizational change. These reactions explained by the job insecurity and wrong identity treats by M&A (Pikula,,p.8). As Garibaldi de Hilal says: "Behavioral resistance is represented by actions that denote unwillingness to accept the modifications and, consequently, lack of commitment to support organizational change, which endangers chances of M&A success" (Garibaldi de Hilal, 2013, p 5). But Marks and Mirvis argues that differences in organizational culture may force to succeed M&As and reduce employee resistance (MArks and Mirvis, 2011, p.860).

As mentioned above, M&As suffer from cultural differences. Before the merger, every company has its own history, products, markets and ways of running the business. For the employees M&A are very challenging (Sarala, Cooper, 2014, p.3). It leads to cultural clashes, that makes impossible for M&A to succeed (Sarala, Stahl,p.3).

According to Pikula, employees may split up in two groups. Ulrich and van Dick noticed that, the identification of people with their organization is weak, because they tend to identify themselves with their workgroup (Van Dick p.7).

Employees of the acquiring company tends to feel as they are superior in compare to the staff from the acquired company. It even may lead to competitive feelings and attitudes between employee groups. The workers from the acquired firm see in acquiring firm as the potential enemy. This fact is described as the "us-versus-them" syndrome (Pikula, p11). According to the social identity theory, people tend to communicate with those, who are similar to them, they show positive attitude towards members of their own group and negative toward others (MArks and Mirvis ,2011,p 165). Moreover, the difference in the size of the companies may play a vital role as well. The bigger the company, the power and influence it has on the partner-firm (Makri 2012,p.116).

Some M&As are supposed to be a "merger of equal", it means that equality should be maintained. But as Ullrich and van Dick says that, in reality this does not exist, because with time one of the companies become to act as a dominant and it is easy to notice who is controlling and who is being controlled ( van Dick p.3). Acquired or small firms refer to low status groups, they are not able to provide members with a positive social identity (van Dick p.10). That is why employee feel fear, stress, sadness and grief. These factors may push the worker to leave the company. If a significant amount of talented personnel leaves the organization, there may be little point in acquiring it.