There are definitely better ways and worse ways... I guess it depends some on what's be acquired, is it just a revenue and customer acquisition or is it a technology acquisition?
I can't say names here. I once worked at a rinky-dink startup, one of the early guys, we raised some cash, burned through it, and finally found an acquirer. The acquirer had been acquired by a larger company a handful of years earlier and essentially operated as its own entity and they wanted to "not break" us.
They essentially treated us hands off and invested in us, it felt great, we got raises, better insurance, new computers and such. The pressure of not worrying about the company dying was awesome. There
were some things that bothered different people differently, we had to switch to their email system, they eventually came and re-numbered out network and kind of took control of some things we
probably shouldn't have had control of in the first place. No one left, I don't remember anyone being too upset, basically everything was exactly the same as it had been, only we weren't going to die and they gave us more money..
A different sort of thing did start to happen though, we'd been on life-support doing what companies on life-support do, we worked as quickly as possible, cutting out everything that wasn't essential. We were now part of an organization with a name, a brand, a real sales force that was good, and some different expectations on our output. I think it became clear that we were putting out a different callibre product than what was expected from the organization as a whole and at that point that started getting more hands on and we initially reacted with paranoia. Probably cost the product about 9 months to a year and we probably should have changed some of the staffing, some folks just couldn't change gears.
In retrospect, if I could do it again from their side. They made fairly generous offers to the "brilliant engineers" to keep them there, think nice raises and then about $400,000 in various stock based
incentives to hang out for 3 years. They should have been a bit more hands on early, explained what is expected, explained what the brand means, explains how if something takes longer to do it right then
we're going to do it right rather than force it out and after maybe 6 months offered some folks like 1/3 of the stick-around-money to leave if they didn't want to be part of it, just vested it early if they wanted to walk away.
Seems like you want the dust to settle, things to calm down, then you want to tackle the cultural changes (and regardless of how close things are, there will be some) head on. And in my mind, if there are some bad cultural fits, then that just needs to come out, be addressed and have some sort of amicable way to part. If the culture change is one that involves going from the "Adult plan" to time-sheets, it's gonna hurt, in fact it just seems silly.