Making the most of multiple worlds: Multiple organizational identities as resources in the formation of an integrated health care delivery system

Abstract

In spite of an undeniably vast and multidisciplinary body of research on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) spanning more than 50 years, extant scholarship provides little insight into how two organizations that have struggled to integrate rebound from failure in their relationship. This dissertation examines two organizations—AMC Hospital and Community Hospital—that achieved this outcome nearly 16 years after they legally merged. To understand this phenomenon, I conducted an inductive, longitudinal qualitative study of these two organizations and their members using interviews, archival data, and observations as my data sources and grounded theory techniques to analyze the data and build theory. Extending prior research on M&As, multiple organizational identity management, and identities as resources in organizations, I advance the notion of multiple identity resourcing by examining how the negotiation of multiple organizational identities fostered greater resource sharing and generation during post-merger integration. Additionally, I elaborate prior research on meaning construction during strategic change by examining how managers’ interpretations of the power and intimacy dynamics in the merger relationship influenced their strategizing, which affected organizational-level episodes of success and failure during the integration process. More broadly, I demonstrate how practices at both the level of the merger relationship and the level of strategy implementation enable successful performance during post-merger integration.