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Merging Cultures: Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Differentiation in a Health System Merger

Health system mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have increased exponentially in recent years as a result of the Affordable Care Act (Brown, Werling, Walker, Burgdorfer & Shields, 2012). M&As are consummated as a way to control for interdependencies within the market, control costs and leverage debt, and negotiate better rates among health insurers (Bolman & Deal, 2013; Cooper & Finkelstein, 2010; Mirc, 2013). Regardless of the impetus for a merger, the largest predictor of the success or failure of a M&A lies within the organizational culture (Brown, et al., 2012; Cooper & Finkelstein, 2010; Kastor, 2010; Ovseiko, Melham, Fowler & Buchan, 2015). The purpose of this research was to assess the organizational culture of two competing health organizations prior to a planned merger and understand whether there were significant differences in pre-merger culture compared to a post-merger preferred organizational culture using the Competing Values Framework (CVF). The population included all employees of both health systems with the survey respondent sample stratified by the following employee types: (Tier 1), entry-level employee; (Tier 2), supervisory level, and, (Tier 3), executive level. Statistical procedures included independent t tests, one-way and two-way analyses of variance.
Findings indicated a statistically significant difference existed between the current cultures of the health systems prior to the merger; however, both systems sets of employees preferred a post-merger organizational culture that was not statistically different from each other. Further, there were significant differences in the cultural perceptions of Tier 1 employees and Tier 2 employees and no significant differences between Tier 3 employee perceptions of culture as compared to Tier 1 or Tier 2.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:etd-4701
Date01 August 2017
CreatorsChesley, Colin G
PublisherDigital Commons @ East Tennessee State University
Source SetsEast Tennessee State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright by the authors.

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