Sensemaking and organizational identities in M&A

The evolution of organizational identity is often represented as a combination of an intentional management (sensegiving) and a more social negotiated sensemaking. The need to “lead” the organizational identities evolution cannot forget the social nature of this process. This work proposes to use cognitive maps in order to understand this process and generate an action plan that allows to partially lead a social process.Even if the qualitative approach of this work has the well-known limitation in generalization of findings, it is possible to underline at least two main results:• the necessity to manage deliberately the organizational identity as a variable that can affect the success of post merger integration;• the necessity to consider that the evolution of organizational identity is a social negotiation and a process of sensemaking.