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Research has demonstrated that mergers and acquisitions often fail, in significant part because companies fail to effectively integrate their diverse organizational cultures. This case study provides an in‐depth description of one company’s organizational culture just prior to being acquired, and demonstrates how it began to change almost immediately following the acquisition. The new CEO affected the acquired company’s culture directly by changing roles, responsibilities, policies, procedures, and practices. He affected it indirectly through his influence on other organizational members. Suggestions for effectively managing the integration of diverse organizational cultures following an acquisition are discussed.

The goal of the current study was to replicate and extend the perceived cultural compatibility index developed by Veiga et al. and Very et al. In extending their work, the sample studied was large enough to allow use of confirmatory factor analysis for examining the index beyond the exploratory factor analysis used in its development. Further, the paper treated organizational culture as a socially constructed phenomenon and included all employee classifications in the study. The results show evidence of a second‐order factor model for perceived cultural compatibility rather than the single factor view of culture offered by Veiga et al. and Very et al.