Abstract
While the adjustment of the financial, capital and market structure ensures firms’ control rights after merger and acquisition (M&A), organizational culture as an informal system can profoundly affect the control rights of the company from the values, business philosophy and code of conduct，and even business performance. If there is no effective cultural integration, the conflict between the two sides due to corporate cultural differences will inevitably result in the lost in talent people, customer resource and other advantages.
This research attempts to examine culture integration in post-M&A in Chinese healthcare industry by proposing a cultural integration based on core capabilities. Drawing on merger and acquisition integration theory, this research identifies the key factors that affect the success of merger and acquisition integration. Through theoretical deduction and empirical analysis, this research explains the internal logical relationship between post-merger and corporate performance is explained. This research finds that corporate culture is the sum of corporate values, corporate systems and codes of conduct formed in the long-term survival and development of the company. The corporate culture can be explained into three levels: corporate ideological culture, corporate institutional culture and corporate image culture. Among them, ideological culture includes three indicators such as values, ethos and goals; institutional culture includes three indicators including work system, responsibility system and special system; and image culture includes office environment, brand identity and other images.
In terms of research design, this study explores the evaluation of corporate culture integration after mergers and acquisitions by employees in the medical industry through questionnaires, and establishes a comprehensive evaluation system for corporate culture integration after mergers and acquisitions. In addition, this research uses expert interviews, Delphi method, and fuzzy multi-level analysis (Fuzzy AHP) to evaluate the key to corporate cultural integration after mergers and acquisitions, and analyzes experts’ evaluation of the corporate culture of the three companies acquired by Century Galaxy Difference. The research results show that Century Galaxy Company has a good corporate culture integration after the merger. The key to the integration of corporate culture lies in the integration of ideological culture, followed by institutional culture, and finally image culture. Further research found that the overall evaluation of Century Galaxy Company's corporate culture is superior to the three companies A, B, and C of the merger. In particular, Century Galaxy Company is superior to the three M & A companies in terms of ideological culture and institutional culture, but not so in the image culture. Therefore, in terms of integration of corporate culture, Century Galaxy Company's merger and acquisition of three companies can achieve the merger and acquisition performance from the integration of ideological culture and institutional culture. Century Galaxy Company can improve the self-image culture with the help of the original good image culture of the three companies.
The evaluation framework established by this research can be used as a systematic method that can be used in the integration of corporate mergers and acquisitions and can provide an index reference for the management of mergers and acquisitions after mergers and acquisitions. Through the calculation of the main indicators of corporate mergers and acquisitions integration, the lack of existing corporate culture evaluation literature is supplemented. This provides some directions for the further development of the cultural integration assessment framework.
KEY WORDS：M&A; Corporate culture; Cultural integration; M&A performance; Medical industry