ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on research conducted on the nature of emotional connectedness during the first three years of a newly merged entity. It presents an overview of the organizational merger referred. The chapter considers the dynamics of a merger experienced as a catastrophic change: the persecutory anxieties invoked by the change, and the defences mobilized in response to those anxieties. It discusses the containment of unconscious anxieties in organizational mergers. The new management of a merged organization must have a capacity to deal with primitive destructive impulses of murderous rage, aggression, hate, envy, and projected guilt. The act of annihilating parts of the former organizations is experienced as disengaged and murderous by employees. A merger of organizations, or of business divisions within an enterprise, is a radical change to the identities of the existing enterprises. The new structure of the Australia-New Zealand part of the organization was modelled on a matrix of service products and industry sectors.
