The threat of dis-identification for HR practices: An ethnographic study of a merger

SummaryResearch shows that HR practices play a crucial role in postmerger integration by facilitating employees’ identification with the new company. However, the effects of identity and identification dynamics upon these practices have yet to be examined. We draw on an ethnographic study of a merger among four different banks to outline the challenges that identification processes among employees create for these HR practices. Specifically we underscore the possibility of dis-identification among employees from different premerger organizations and explore the obstacles it rises to HR practices which seek to foster postmerger identification. Our findings show that HR practices can, unexpectedly, result in initial dis-identification and disrupt integration in multiple ways. We integrate our findings into a model, which maps the mutually constituted processes of identification and dis-identification. Employees of the pre-merger companies experience human resource practices by framing and enacting them to create differences with the others, and by elaborating postmerger encounters enabled by HR practices into occasion for dis-identification and civil inattention.

► Employees prevent other premerger companies’ staff from influencing their identity.
► Staff of a premerger organization dismiss HR practices from daily challenges.
► HR practices during a merger process actually led to dis-identification of members.
► The enactment of broad HR practices is insufficient to build up a new identity.