Strategic Risk and Uncertainty in the Automotive Cross Border Mergers (CBMs)

Lack of an initial risk assessment in terms of cultural incompatibility has been regarded as one major issue in the context of mergers.Cultural incompatibility is conceived as a prominent risk factor affecting the quality of operational integration in the post-merger integration stage. The effect of incompatibility in CBMs is even more evident as firms not only need to cope with the risk in the level of organisation but the national level as well. This raises further concerns regarding the realisation of integration synergies andachievement towards the desired performance.This research adopts a risk mitigation approach. The aim is to realise the extent that two nominated firms are capable to be integrated from cultural perspective.The research considers firm?s Top Management Team (TMT) style as the index to determine the overall risk of cultural incompatibility. It investigates the potential capability of each party for integration in terms of two defined cultural risk factors called personality (i.e. socio-cultural integration) and functionality (i.e. task integration).Provided with the defined metric(s) for each risk factor, the quantitative measures would be used as inputs for a decision-making analysis system that realises the achievable level of cultural integration for the nominated firms.