MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Merger management
that it would be a smooth transition and we didn't have it with
this merger. There was a resistance to doing that, I think. My
impression was that CPSA partners were dragged kicking and
screaming into this merger and thought that they were creating a
bigger CPSA whereas my experience from previous mergers
was that that just never happened. If you were not going to
have people feeling really disaffected, you had to do a lot of
ground work to allay people's fears. So it was a very difficult
time in the early days. People saying, in the usual way, this is
not the way we do things and, everything has changed -- we are
doing it all your way whereas we were doing it in a completely
different way from any other union so that put people's fears into
perspective. And I think also from the CPSA they didn't have
that line management structure that had been developed with
more autonomy to the senior managers in decision-making so
that was a bit of culture shock as well because that was
something that was imported as a sensible way of doing
business in a very large organisation. You couldn't centralise all
the decision-making. That was a big culture shock for people.
(Interviewee N)
Ex CPSA managers did not corroborate this, although the lack of a
process is mentioned:-
I think it is a very interesting area, the management of trade
unions, the terrible reputation that they tend to have in terms of
trying to manage processes. There was quite a lot of work…..so
I was expecting lots of working parties and meetings with
colleagues and so on and really it did not happen with the PCS
merger. Prior to the members’ vote, the whole process was in
some confusion. There did not seem to be any clear goals or
outlines or anybody really driving the whole process (Interviewee
E)
And another from CPSA suggests that she took initiatives herself to try
to manage the position:-
Right from the very start, before the merger happened, we were
just told who we would be getting in the team and it quickly had
to be identifying those individuals because…the bargaining team
which I jointly manage, is really sort of 50/50 of the two unions
and so the first problem was that we were in different locations.
It was getting first of all the officers together who were initially
identified before the support staff and sorting out what we were
going to do because the other thing that we were given was
what work would come in but we were left to decide how the
work was going to be done between the officers. So there was a
lot of, initially, setting the team up. So that was a totally new
area of work for me -- setting up a team right from scratch with
people that I had not worked with before and then getting
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