Culture & Change Management

I’ve experienced the “us vs them” dynamic you describe. It’s typically strongest at acquisition and then tails off, however in my case, a four‑year integration prolonged the divide of different teams and ways of working, sometimes creating a competitive view and making relationship‑building harder. Notably, this was between two entities with broadly similar cultures; so with a larger cultural gap, the effort to align would be significantly greater.

I think one of the biggest things overlooked in the cultural aspect of integration is not only the recognition of the corproate culture and the “us vs them” mindset that typically is thought of during M&A, but also the national identity / local culture that may also serve as an undertone for any large acquisition, particularly one where the target is based in (or primarily comprised of individuals from) a different country than the acquiring firm. This was a hard-fought lesson for me in some of my earlier deals. The things that motivate one group of people from a cultural standpoint will absolutely not motivate others from a different culture. I had hoped that the HR functional integration module had hit on this more, because I’d love to know more scholarly components on how to plan/prepare for assessment of different country cultures vs corporate cultures. I’m US-based, as is my company. I’ve tried to help some of my direct reports in thinking this through, but a good reference point I always say is that the concept of “the American dream” is something that is uniquely American, and it does not necessarily correlate well to many individuals based in, for example, the Philippines. A sales strategy for a US-based target customer is different than the sales strategy for an Italian-based customer. A purchase negotiation for a supplier in India is different than the purchase negotiation for a supplier in Brazil. If we know these things to be true, then true culture & change management of acquired-entity firms should also consider the national culture of where the acquired firm is based, or the national culture of its member employees in the event they are based elsewhere.

Building on your point, I’ve seen these dynamics very clearly in a cross-border acquisition I was part of, where we acquired a tech company with a large employee base in India—our first major expansion into that region.

The main cultural risk wasn’t just “differences,” but how those differences showed up in communication and management expectations. The India-based team tended to use more formal, context-heavy communication styles, while our existing organization was much more direct, informal, and fast-paced. Without alignment, this easily could have led to misunderstandings around tone, urgency, or accountability.

What helped significantly was that leadership acknowledged this early and treated culture and communication as a core integration stream, not a side topic. We addressed it both pre- and post-close through structured efforts: we ran training for the broader organization on Indian cultural and workplace norms and also provided onboarding for the acquired team on how our company communicates internally and externally—especially around directness, escalation, and written vs. verbal expectations.

This two-way approach helped reduce the “us vs. them” mindset and prevented early friction from being misinterpreted as performance issues. In my experience, the biggest value came from treating communication as a bridge in both directions, rather than expecting one side to fully adapt to the other.