While
corporate integrity and conscientiousness are important, warmth and
empathy are particularly relevant when two sub-cultures are likely to
be competing and we would expect this finding to apply in many
other merger situations and during other significant organisational
changes such as a reorganisation or downsizing. An interesting
finding is the combined importance of physical proximity and time
proximity in building or damaging emotional attachment to the
merged entity. Fig. 1 summarises this interaction in a generalised
form. The more disaffected in our study were those who had been
employed the longest and who worked remotely from head offic