What’s behind these contradictory findings? There is a well-established body of theory
and research on the challenges associated with combining peoples from different cultures. Social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981;Turner, 1982) contends that organization
members show a positive bias toward members of their own in-group and tend to hold a
negative view about the members of an outgroup in order to enhance the relative standing of their own kind. This in-group bias and “us-versus-them” comparisons are greatest when there is a perceived external threat—as is common in M&A activity—and when the out-group is perceived to be very different from the in-group (Elsass & Veiga, 1994; Hogg & Terry, 2000)