Success or failure in any given project management depends much on the organization’s culture, which encompasses, policies, values, attitude and communication. Positive culture supports the change and promotes the success of any project whereas negative culture takes to care of the status quo for fear of possible consequences that may come with change (Kerzner, 2010). To understand the effect of culture, one needs to understand the role of bureaucracy, legal implication, organizational culture and potential corruption in the success of every project.
The effect of culture has been common in most of the recent mergers in the world. A good example is Pan American Silver Corp, which acquired Minefinders Corporation Limited in the year 2012. Culture has played a number of roles since it was made legal by the court. Many mergers fail because they overlook the effect of culture before and after the merger. Since a merger involves more than one company, it comes with different cultures that are to operate as one unit.
Integrating different cultures into a single unit is the biggest challenge most mergers ever experience. However, Pan American Silver Corp and Minefinders Corporation have carefully but slowly worked on the pre- and post-merger cultural integration.
There are different perspectives of culture; the first one is rule-oriented culture. This is a bureaucratic type culture, which focuses much on the job description and involves specializing in a given functional area (Halligan, 2013). The management team, in the merger between Pan American Silver Corp and Minefinders Corporation, had to carry out assessments to identify areas of specialization that each of the companies acquired for an accurate job assignment. Role-oriented culture views people as interchangeable and not as individual persons. The second culture is task-oriented; it emphasizes the value of teamwork in achieving the customer’s desired product.
The third culture is the power-oriented culture, which highlights respect for authority. Those in leadership capacity ensure that they gain absolute power in order to remain relevant. Pan American Silver Corp and Minefinders Corporation had to work hard to minimize the effect of this culture because it would have promoted nepotism and favoritism in the company (Halligan, 2013). The power-oriented culture encourages corruption since leaders would want to employ their relatives and friends through corrupt means even without relevant qualifications, which would definitely lead to the failure of the business.
The merger between Pan American Silver Corp and Minefinders Corporation has been successful because of the successful integration of two different cultures in a bid to achieve a win-win scenario. The overseers of the merger reduced the cultural resistance that would have led to the failure of the company. The merging firms took care of potential legal requirements in time, and the court gave the go-ahead for its formation after all the legal requirements had been present. The two merging companies based their level of control and regulation on mutual agreement, and, therefore, the merger had little effect of bureaucracy during its formation and after the merger (Halligan, 2013).
Those two big companies properly managed fear of corrupt deals, while in other mergers, ensuring a properly defined organizational hierarchy reduced the level of commands. Culture can be a curse or a boon in project management depending on how properly the company handles it (Steen, 2010). A successful project is one that carries out after examination of possible effects of organizational culture before and after the merger.
Reference List
Halligan, M. (2013). How Bureaucratic Structure Matters. London: Sage Print.
Kerzner, H. (2010). Project Management Best Practice: Action Global Excellent. (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Steen, E. (2010). Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity, Management. New York: Harper & Row.