Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Van den Steen, Eric
• 署名单位: Harvard University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1100.1214
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 1718-1738
• 关键词: corporate strategy; culture clash; Mergers and Acquisitions; Corporate culture; performance; differing priors; heterogeneous priors

摘要

This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture-in the sense of shared beliefs and values-in order to study the effects of culture clash in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared beliefs lead to more delegation, less monitoring, higher utility (or satisfaction), higher execution effort (or motivation), faster coordination, less influence activities, and more communication, but also to less experimentation and less information collection. When two firms that are each internally homogeneous but different from each other merge, the above results translate to specific predictions about how the change in homogeneity will affect firm behavior. This paper's predictions can also serve more in general as a test for the theory of culture as shared beliefs.