PRAGMATISM AND PERSONALISM IN POST-MERGER LEADERSHIP: LESSONS FROM THE FOUNDING OF LULAC

Mergers are intended to create more robust firms, but history shows such combinations routinely fall short of expectations, often due to inadequate employee identification with the new organization. While leadership is crucial to the implementation of any significant organizational change, follower perceptions of leadership generally determine post-merger success. Therefore the leadership needed to enhance the acculturation of followers with a new, merged organization should likely be viewed through a lens of social construction. Although researchers have begun to consider leadership as a social phenomenon, credible depictions of this process with respect to post-merger identification are lacking. During archival research of the primary Mexican American Civil Rights groups in South Texas in the 1920s, most of which eventually merged into the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), we discovered substantial intimation of the construction and preservation of a leadership identity capable of engend...