”They can name us what they want” – A case study from an organizational identity perspective of an integration process in a consultancy company

Abstract

In 2010, two large Nordic companies operating within the IT sector merged and decided to create a brand-new company together. Our study takes place during the spring of 2012, during which time the new company – which in this thesis is called NewCo – was launched internally and externally. The purpose of this case study is to understand the integration process within a consultancy company from an organizational identity perspective. Through interviews and observations, we have performed a qualitative study of how employees in the Gothenburg office experience the ongoing organizational identity work. The Gothenburg office’s primary activities concern IT consultancy, and having a consistent organizational identity is especially important in consultancy companies since it is one of the few ways through which management can control consultants’ behavior. Furthermore, organizational identity issues are likely to present in all mergers, and it can both hinder and/or facilitate the integration processes taking place after a merger. We found that the Gothenburg employees have a strong organizational identity that permeates the local organization. Their organizational identity is based on identification with mainly two things: the Gothenburg office and professionalism. Our findings map out how the organizational identity of both the Gothenburg office and the surrounding organization affect and influence each other. Although integrating merging companies is an ongoing process rather than a goal one ever reaches, we have found the first stage of the integration process to be promising in terms of the possibilities for realizing further unification efforts. However, the employees still identify primarily with the Gothenburg office rather than NewCo.