Eva, "prevewnting" a takeover IS in the interest of shareholders. Takeovers cannot be prevented altogether: poison pills increase the price, which is in the interest of the shareholders.
Sound like you'be been subjected to a great deal of anti-management rhetoric from armshair generals in your company: somehow, even if one's expertise is limited in makign two-sided copies, he still knows best what is good for the company --- having never seen its books even!
With this in mind, Cook increased the debt to value ratio to a such a high level that a take-over was unattractive. And what happened to the price of the stock?
The idea was to keep the company going, rather than please the stock holders. I would think that to let the company function as a going concern IS the mains interest of the shareholders.
After the embargo of '78, ARCO pulled out of all it's foreign holdings and concentrated solely on it's Alaskan oil, purposely to be free of the OPEC pressure. That is a bet the company made, like many strategic decisions management faces.
ARCO was one of those companies that people were proud to work for, What people are proud of is the function of their psyche and often has little to do with the object of pride. Witness, for instance, the pride of a parent in her or his child: it is there even when the child's achievements are average. There is nothing wrong with that (in fact it's great for the lucky child) but it has nothing to do with the child itself.
In those times, Eva, Americans were generally proud of their corporations. The same was true about people who worked for GM, GE, aerospace industry: you were a part of something big, you were making America great. A generation before that, Americans were proud of their country in general, but by '70s the civil rights movements not only achieved equality for minorities but went further and imposed guilt and shame on Americans. We were no longer proud of our country and ashamed of what "we" have done to the VIetnamese, blacks, women, Latin Americans: the leftists have won that territory. However, we were still proud of our corporations.
Well, the battle continued and granted more victories to the left, which after patriotism went on to dismantle other insitutuions: family, parenting, primary education (liberal arts higher education is dead since 1050s) -- and, finally, capitalism itself. The change in attitude manifested itself in 1987-1989 or so with a notable increase in labor turnoover: loyalty to companies has disappeared. Companies have responded, of course, by cutting costs in that area --- from reduced benefits to "hotelling" (office-sharing).
You may or may not see the point in the specifics I offered, but the main point is valid: whether employees feel good or bad working for the company has nothing to do with the company's strategy in the global market. This is simply because people do not know management, although they believe they do --- just because they observed their managers (sort of like fancying oneself being an engineer just because you've seen a car or better yet --- drove one!) Havig very little reason of that kind, people liked working for ARCO in 1970s and they do not, as you say, now --- with equally little reason.
Most certainly, this feeling has nothing to do with the company strategy or country of incorporation.