Chapter 25: Cultural Profiling

1. Cartwright and Cooper (1990) argue that the most fundamental factor contributing to merger success is the positive combination of people, their expertise and their:

organizational cultures core competencies different skill sets enthusiasm

2. What percentage of top executives of acquired companies leave within the first year?

10% 25% 50% 2%

3. Several writers (Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Bartels et al., 2006; van Dick et al., 2006) suggest that _________________ offers a conceptual framework for understanding why many employees react negatively.

social identity theory the minimal group paradigm Utilitarianism Porter's Five Forces

4. Who conducted a series of seminal studies on intergroup discrimination?

Van Dick et al. Hubbard Nahavandi and Malekzadeh Tajfel and colleagues

5. Often, when employees perceive the merger or acquisition as a threat to the distinctiveness of their pre-merger group identity, this identity becomes more salient and in-group differences and out-group similarities are ________.

maximised minimised not spoken about None of the above

6. Hubbard (1999) suggests that one of the factors that make cultural differences problematic is that while employees tacitly understand their own culture, they often ______________.

cannot explain it to new colleagues don’t understand how to keep it from changing don't actually like it None of the above

7. Berry (2005) defines acculturation as the dual process of __________________ change that takes place as a result of contact between two or more cultural groups and their individual members.

social and cultural cultural and transitional cultural and psychological social and emotional

8. Assimilation is a unilateral process in which:

members of the acquired unit seek to preserve their own culture and practices unit members reject cultural contact with both their and the other unit there is some degree of change for both units but both maintain many of the basic assumptions, beliefs, work practices and systems that are important to them one group willingly adopts the identity and culture of the other

9. For the acquiring unit, integration will be its preferred mode of acculturation when:

the unit is unicultural and the merger is with a related unit it is a multicultural unit and the merger is with a related unit the acquirer is multicultural and the merger is with an unrelated unit one group willingly adopts the identity and culture of the other

10. Organizational culture has been defined by Schein (1990) as:

the pattern of basic assumptions that are invented, discovered or developed by a group as it ‘the way we see things around here’ corporate culture the good or bad feelings that pervade an organization

11. Harrison (1972, 1986) identified four types of culture:

Power, skills, person, team Role, task, management, team Power, departmental, divisional, hierarchical Power, role, task/achievement and person/support

12. Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of power cultures?

Centralised power Few rules, little bureaucracy, decisions made by individua;s not committees Hierarchical Unequal access to resources

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