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Due diligence refers to a comprehensive process of investigating and evaluating business opportunities in mergers and acquisitions. While early-stage due diligence usually encompasses financial and strategic assessment, one of the most important things in due diligence is looking at organizational culture at an early stage. This chapter takes stock of the existing research and practice in the area of cultural due diligence and evaluates the strengths and limitations. Based on the review of literature, we developed a framework for cultural due diligence to address the limitations of existing approaches. The framework illustrates a process to screen the M&A targets, gain insight into the target firm’s culture, and identify integration challenges. The process starts with more unobtrusive, indirect, and informal assessments of the target firm’s culture and moves onto more obtrusive, direct, and formal assessments.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the impact of different dimensions of organizational culture (mission culture, adaptability culture, involvement culture and consistency culture) on business excellence results criteria (customer results, people results, society results and business results) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and explore the moderating role of information and communication technology (ICT) use in both service and manufacturing industries.

Data were collected by questionnaire from 448 managers in nine companies that have won the Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award in the last three years. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the data.

Organizational culture is significantly related to business excellence. However, these effects varied for different business excellence criteria. Three organizational culture types had a significant positive role in achieving excellent customer-related results. All four types of organizational culture had a positive role in achieving excellent people-related results. Only two culture types had significant role in achieving excellent society-related results. Business results were positively related to a balance between the four types of organizational culture. ICT use moderated the relationship between organizational culture and results related to customers, people and business, but not society.

This study had some conceptual limitations. In particular, it considered the organizational culture as four types in the research model, but without structuring the indices under each type. It also had some methodological limitations. It was cross-sectional and used a self-administered questionnaire, which means that no causal relationships can be implied, and there may have been some bias in responding.

This is one of the first studies that investigate the relationship between organizational culture and business excellence in UAE excellence award-winning companies.

This chapter presents two studies that examine the link between corporate culture and effectiveness in a variety of national settings. The first study compares results from 230 organizations from Europe, North America and Asia and reveals a surprising level of similarity in results across these regions. The second study presents the results from targeted samples of 218 supermarkets from Canada, Australia, Brazil, the U.S., Japan, Jamaica, and South Africa. These results show a common pattern in five of the countries, and a divergent pattern of findings in Jamaica and Japan.

The results suggest that it is quite possible to measure and compare the cultural traits of organizations and their impact on business performance across nations, and to find empirical support for a general framework. But how can these findings be reconciled with the vast literature on cross-cultural differences? Discussion of this point reaches an interesting conclusion: Perhaps there is a common set of cultural traits that can be used to understand the effectiveness of organizations, but that are expressed quite differently in different national settings.

The purpose of this paper is to share with organizations a method for integrating organizational culture change and leadership development within one balanced corporate initiative.

This paper describes the benefits of organizational culture and leadership development, the steps taken to design such a program within a large, global manufacturing organization, and the benefits of the integrated program.

Integrating organizational culture with leadership development can help create a clear “line of sight” between the individual and the organization and builds broader accountability for the success of organizational change initiatives.

Integrated culture and leadership programs can be designed within any environment. This case study serves as an example to provide readers with ideas for how to create and implement similar programs in other organizations.

Kotter stresses the need for leadership in organizational change, however, few case studies have been published in this area that articulate how leadership and organizational development can be successfully integrated.

How generalizable are 360-degree feedback instruments in different cultures? Research investigating the validity and utility of these instruments across the globe is scarce, yet, extraordinarily important. This chapter investigates the utility of a 360-degree feedback instrument across the globe, as well as how different raters from various cultures perceive leaders.

Bryan Adkins is the president of Denison Consulting. His primary expertise is in the area of organizational culture and leadership. He is an experienced consultant and coach working with leaders and teams as they guide their organizations through transitions. Bryan has led a number of large-scale culture change projects and provides consulting services designed to leverage the data collected through the use of the Denison model and associated diagnostics. Bryan holds a master's degree in business from Penn State University and his doctorate in human and organizational studies from The George Washington University.

Cross-border M&A has become one of the leading approaches for firms to gain access to global markets. Yet there has been little progress in the research literature exploring the role that culture may play in the success of these ventures. Poor culture-fit has often been cited as one reason why M&A has not produced the outcomes organizations hoped for (Cartwright & Schoenberg, 2006). Cross-border M&A has the added challenges of having to deal with both national and organizational culture differences. In this chapter we review the literature on cultural integration in cross-border M&A and provide a framework designed to help manage the integration process throughout the M&A lifecycle. This framework presents culture assessment and integration as a crucial component to reducing poor culture-fit as a barrier to M&A success.

Kevin Au graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a BBA and earned his Ph.D. in management/international business at the University of British Columbia. He co-founded the CUHK Center for Entrepreneurship and has been an associate director. He also serves as associate director of the MBA programme. His research interests are international management, entrepreneurship, family business, social network and cross-cultural research methodology. He has published dozens of academic articles, cases and book chapters, and served on the editorial boards of several academic journals. He has provided consulting and training for the government and business corporations. His clients include the Central Policy Unit, Hong Kong Cyberport, Ove Arup and a number of business startups and family businesses in Hong Kong.