By studying organizational mergers as intergroup relations, previous research showed that partners prefer merger patterns that keep or improve their group’s status, with consequences for merger support. This research focuses on the reaction to a merger announcement by low-status merger partners, in terms of their group’s perceived representativeness/prototypicality in the post-merged organization, and commitment with upcoming changes. Given the stress created by the announcement, causing insecure intergroup relations that affect prototypicality judgments, we extend previous findings with a cognitive/motivational framework (how employees process merger-related information). More precisely, in a scenario experiment (N= 131), we examined merger patterns, representativeness/prototypicality claims and their underlying motives, as well as merger support in a common framework. We predicted and found that an integration-equality merger pattern (not perpetuating status differences) leads to more commitment with change than an integration-proportionality merger pattern (perpetuating the group’s lower status), which is explained by higher representativeness/prototypicality claims for the new organization. Moreover, this mediation effect is conditional to systematic (high elaboration) information processing when performing prototypicality judgments. These results are important to understand and promote adjustment to changes in intergroup relations between groups of asymmetric status.

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