The origin of employee disaffection with a merger is not
homogenous. It can vary by background, which of the merging
companies one is from and whether an employee has joined postmerger.
Employees from the acquiring company should not be
presumed to be more favourably disposed towards a merger. 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 office