The ESCP Professor of Management’s free case study entitled The Acquisition Experiences of KazOil won an award from The Case Centre, thereby making both her employer and homeland proud.

The Case Centre granted Maral Muratbekova-Touron and her co-author an award for their free case, which describes two diverging post-acquisition experiences of KazOil, an oil production company based in Kazakhstan, the largest country in Central Asia and bigger than the whole of Western Europe, in the years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. KazOil was the main employer of the small town of Kyzyl-Orda, where its main production field and support offices are located, and where the case takes place. The company adapted more successfully after it was bought by Canadian corporation Hydrocarbons Ltd in 1996, then exposed to new human resource strategies and corporate culture and management style, than after China Petrol acquired its assets in 2005: compared to the previous owners, who worked closely with staff and involved them in decision-making, the latest Chinese bosses were sticklers for bureaucracy, hierarchy and set rules and practices. Within the first two years of the acquisition, many local managers had left. “Everything is better now – we have medical insurance, we have good bonuses… But people are still leaving, and that is directly caused by the different style of management,” a KazOil Corporate Taxes Manager is cited as saying.

Striking the right balance between research and teaching

Maral Muratbekova-Touron works in the department of Strategy, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources at ESCP’s Paris campus. She and Dana Minbaeva, who is Professor of Strategic and Global Human Resource Management at the Department of Strategy and Innovation, and the Vice-President for International Affairs at Copenhagen Business School, are originally from Kazakhstan. They wrote several articles together, one of which won a ”That’s interesting!” award at the Academy of International Business (2013) and was recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics. Another one, published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, led them to write a short case study for Harvard Business Review Russia, then the current one for The Case Centre. "We always strive for research-based teaching,” explains Maral Muratbekova-Touron.
The authors also made the most of the fact that they are acquainted with the Kazakhstani culture and speak the local languages (Kazakh and Russian). “The case material came from data that was collected over ten years through a process of participant observation, interviews, and survey data. Respondents felt more comfortable talking about the issues in informal surroundings, for example during coffee breaks, social gatherings, and around the water cooler. So we heard a lot of interesting stories that contributed to the final case.”
Writing a case from published sources has its benefits, helping create the storyline, but it can also become “too dry”. They thus used data triangulation and all three of its subtypes: time, space and person. “We explicitly searched for as many different data sources as possible (face-to-face interviews, group interviews, intra-company surveys, participant observations, archived material) at different times (1997-2007) and in different sub-units of the same subsidiary (three business units, various departments).”
The choice of the companies and the environment in which they operate also makes the case fascinating and truly unique from an empirical point of view. “We chose a developing country and one which is underrepresented in international business research, the Republic of Kazakhstan, as our context,” adds Dana Minbaeva.

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A post-Soviet version of War and Peace

Although the company’s name is disguised in the case, the plot is very real and made worthy of a Tolstoy novel thanks to Tina Pedersen’s editing skills, engaging characters and a compelling protagonist: the case opens up with Nurlan Ospanov, the Head of Corporate Finance at KazOil and a long-time employee, wondering how he should adapt to the changes recently introduced by the Chinese management in order to ensure employees’ motivation before attending a management-hosted "social" event from the owners, which he likened to being forced to watch a military parade in Red Square when he was a kid. A local talent, and perhaps a rising star, Ospanov is nonetheless experiencing doubts, confusion and fears. By “pushing” students into Nurlan’s shoes, the authors make them share the complexity of the situation he is facing.
The case can be taught in a broad range of university-level courses, covering the spectrum from pure strategy and human resources management to cross-cultural management courses. Since it shows a more culturally distant company had greater success in achieving post-acquisition social integration than a culturally close one (China), students can be given the opportunity to challenge the simplistic assumption that national cultural differences affect acquisition outcomes in isolation from other integration-related processes, and thereby take them away from the convenient “just blame the culture” claim.
The fact that the case is available for free download also makes the case stand out. “Business schools in developing countries do not have funding to acquire cases for education, and it’s essential we do all we can to make cases accessible for everyone”, concludes Maral Muratbekova-Touron…

 

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