MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Merger management
very stubborn and cynical about doing that valued it. But it was
about one person in the end that did not pick up that half an
hour. And some others picked up more than that. And that was
incredibly helpful in moving us individually forward. (Interviewee
B)
Some efforts were, however, made to cause staff to reflect on the past
and future, though no other evidence suggests that this was a major
organisational initiative:-
We also tried to get all the staff involved. We had some PCS
induction days. We carefully grouped the staff in a careful
mixture of Inland Revenue, NUCPS and CPSA and outsiders as
well and we ran a whole series of induction days through the first
summer. At that time we tried to get people to say what had
been positive and good about their previous organisation, which
they wanted to continue into the future, and what had a negative
and bad and they wanted to leave behind. We want to be able to
say to people that we are in the organisation that it is built on
what was here before, there are good things that we want to
continue. That was quite useful. It gave is good insight into the
whole organisation and brought out the issues which I have
described you. They came to light through those
courses.(Interviewee J)
There was a suggestion that staff were influenced by the inevitable
rumours that occur in situations of major change:-
The gossip was that the two General Secretaries did not speak,
there were splits on the National Executive, splits among the
senior lay officers and so on and to an extent that was true. That
percolated down through the organisation as inevitably it would
do. So it reached a situation almost that if one person said this
the opposite camp would say no just because of the person
saying it and nobody is always right and nobody is always
wrong. So there were good ideas and good intentions on both
sides of because of the divides we were never going to get a
common approach. So we sort of agitated for a senior managers
meeting which we had and which was pretty dire. In the building,
top table, very formal, nobody really felt comfortable about
saying anything; the one thing that was pushed for by us out of
the meeting was some sort of residential event and that was a
long time coming. It actually came on the back of the Industrial
Society diagnostic report. (Interviewee B)
Ex PTC managers had some explanations for some of the difficulties:-
We had also come with experience of a PTC merger two years
earlier and an awful lot of effort was brought into it in the run-up
to that merger, to make it work, to do a lot of joint working so
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