Current research on individual differences offers the opportunity to inform how employees may achieve effective collaboration during post merger integration.
Individuals play a significant role in determining whether a merger will be successful. Given that many mergers fail to provide lasting shareholder value (Aley and Siegel 1998), studying individual differences could help elucidate aspects of where mergers go wrong. A great deal of work has been done in the area of effective collaboration. Some scholars have focused on process and structure (Thomas 2005, and Hardy, Lawrance, & Grant 2005) while others have examined individual team composition and disposition.
Researchers have debated the ability to measure disposition and its affect on business dynamics. Kilduff and Day (1994) discuss how high self monitors are capable of acting in a manner that supports their ability to earn more promotions than their low self monitoring counterparts. Gaining understanding of how high self monitors use their skills to communicate as they work their way up the corporate ladder has the possibility of informing how to allocate managerial resources during post-merger integration. Analyzing individual dispositions, team makeup and corresponding levels of collaboration may also shed light on the subject.
Conversely, Davis-Blakee and Pfeffer (1989) argued that dispositional research as it relates to organizations was flawed. If dispositional research is unfruitful in studying collaboration, one might consider the structural and process oriented constructs that elicit the greatest collaboration. Are their structures, incentives, and processes that are more effective than others in achieving high levels of collaboration? This ongoing debate offers a number of ideological fields that remain untrodden.
Collaboration in a newly organized merged organization requires employee and manager flexibility. It would be interesting to see if there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect during a merger. Stockholm Syndrome is when an abducted person identifies with their captor and acquiesces to the captor’s wishes (Bejerot, 1974). Is the employee flexibility one sided? Does the power associated with acquiring company affect employee behavior?
By looking at collaborative patterns in a post-merger integrated company, we could see if being acquired (versus acquiring another company) has a discernable effect on personal preferences on either side of the merger. Such findings would shed light on perceived power’s effect on successful integration as well when mergers can modulate employee personality.
In light of our recent readings and subsequent group discussion, the following are two potential areas for further exploration and development:
Research project A
Hypothesis: High self monitors are able to modify their behavior and communicate with diverse groups which will give themselves an advantage to benefit during the post-merger integration process. Cross company teams with high self monitors will have a higher quality of collaboration than those without high self monitors. (Management teams will collaborate better than technical teams because HSM tend to be in management and LSM tend to be in technical areas.)
We suggest collecting survey data at the initial stages of a merger and six months post integration.
We would engage with both companies’ HR to share a online survey tool with a vertical selection of employees. Each company would have the incentive to participate because of the success/failure data that we would generate.
The initial survey would set a base-line for expectations of the merger. Questions regarding development expectations, past career development within the firm, and motivators would allow us to quantify employee’s propensity for high or low self monitoring.
The post integration questionnaire would assess the employees’ realization of their expectations and ask for any expectation revisions for the short to medium term. We would also ask employees about interaction with new company employees (in relation to own company employees) and rate ease of collaborating and successfully progressing towards assigned goals.
Analyzing and comparing the two sets of data would show how high self motivators facilitate merged teams.
Research project B:
Hypothesis: The acquired company employees will tend to adopt the culture of the acquiring company which will lead to more collaborative success.
Again we’d use the survey technique through the HR of both companies; one right at the beginning and one after six months. The questions would elicit characteristics of the company’s culture, collaborative strategies, and the employees’ expectations of the integration process.
The second questionnaire would ask for a new assessment of the culture and collaborative strategies in the new environment and also ask for employees’ assessment of the current reality in reference to initial expectations.
The two sets of data would show whether the acquired company employee’s had adopted the culture of their captors and if the collaborative strategies had changed.
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From Ryan (I had to break it up into two comments):
ReplyDeleteA good first effort. You are taking the ideas you encounter seriously and trying to figure out how to use them and apply them. Here are some comments which I hope will help your thinking/writing:
1. The first two paragraphs don't flow particularly well for me. There are a couple ways to handle this. One might be to spend a little more time working on the prose. Another might be to just write bullet points with explanations under each to address key points. The first option might be useful for practicing in preparation for writing larger works. On the other hand, in your busy lives, and knowing that this is a just a blog intended to get you wrestling with ideas, an economizing approach may also work. Whichever you choose, it helps to make the choice explicitly.
2. The blog began to be interesting for me in the third paragraph, where you said that self monitoring might inform the allocation of resources in PMI. Then, instead of developing the idea, you suggest others could matter as well. I was disappointed with this. I wanted to see you develop the idea. How would you propose that self monitoring affects resource allocation? And what is the basis for your proposition? Developing and explaining propositions like this is the point of doing these blogs.
3. Don't limit yourself to just the individual differences we've read about. When you think about PMI, what other IDs might matter that we haven't read about?
4. Pfeffer and Davis-Blake don't want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. They want us to consider moderated effects of individual differences rather than just direct effects. What do you think moderates the effect of individual differences on resource allocation in PMI?
Continued...
ReplyDelete5. The Stockholm effect idea could be interesting if you developed it. However, would it really tell us about individual differences? It seems like it would tell us more about how context overwhelms individual differences--unless I don't understand something you're trying to say.
6. Okay, I think the acquired/acquiring distinction is a potentially powerful one, but the way you phrased the question suggests a potential misunderstanding in individual differences. IDs like personality traits or skills or demographic characteristics are usually conceived of as either changing slowly or not at all. (Preferences would not be IDs.) The acquired/acquiring context would not usually be seen as changing personality so much as overwhleming or moderating it. That being said, I really like the way you think about moderating variables here. Another way to ask the question might be: "Does one's membership (I'm in the acquiring or the acquired company) moderate the effect of my traits (e.g., extroversion/introversion) on my intention to collaborate?"
7. Okay--so in the research project section you give me a hypothesis about self-monitoring. Good. "Advantage" is not specific enough. "Quality of collaboration" is better, but could be even more specific. You want to be careful, though about conflating self-monitoring with position in the organization.
8. The survey study is, potentially, a good one. One important step to think through in advance is how you measure "quality of collaboration." (Actually, clear variables and measurements in general would need to be considered in depth.) Self-reports may not be believable. Perhaps you could identify integration teams (e.g., the team that integrates operations, the team that integrates finance, the team that integrates marketing, etc.), collect data from team members at time one about which company the come from, self-monitoring tendencies, and a set of control variables, and then at time two collect data from someone who supervises the team (and/or from members on the team) on how well they collaborated. Or you could have their solutions written up and then have independent judges rate how integrative their solutions were. Or something like that. I'm just trying to push your thinking here.
9. Research project B is similar, and would face some of the same issues, but as mentioned above, as currently written, it is not really about IDs.
I hope these comments are helpful in your thinking. We'll discuss them in class.
Thanks for the comments, Ryan.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your point 6, our PMI group also had an idea in the area of acquiring/acquired identity, which hypothesized that the name of the post merged entity could affect collaboration in a post merger integration setting.
If you take the following example: company A acquires company B and the merged entity is called company A, our hypothesis is that representatives from company A will dominate a group. The effect of that could be that employees from company A would dominate group settings, employees from company B may be less likely to want to participate in group-oriented work, and (using Thomas and Kilman's taxonomy of conflict handling modes) become uncooperative and unassertive or uncooperative and assertive.
To firm the hypothesis, we could use secondary sources about mergers in which the above scenarios occurred, our reading already done in identity and group collaboration as well as a deeper dive into social identity theory, organizational identity theory, as well as dominance theory. Building on social identity theory (Tjafel and Turner, 1985) and organizational identity theory, company names have an impact on personal identity. Some have argued that when a company is acquired and its name changed, employee morale goes down (Braham, 1987; Marks, 1988). Whether or not we agree with that research, we can agree that a merger creates “legacy company x and legacy company y” identities based on what we read this week. Certainly the secondary research on this topic is rich and other theories could be applied. Dominance theory (Lee & Ofshe, 1981) argues that people gain power by expressing and earning their dominance in social interactions. Expectation states theory (Berger et al., 1998; Ridgeway, 1986) would argue that a member of the acquiring company could have an advantage in contributing to group mixed group output because he/she has a perceived power based.
To test this empirically, we could run a test using the first year Darden students (who by the end of November have very strong identities tied to their learning teams). If we observed learning teams performing a group oriented task first with their respective team, and then merged all of them using three scenarios described above and had them perform similar tasks, we may be able to observe changes in group interaction, leadership, and conflict. We hypothesize it will be most interesting to track individual changes (i.e. someone who is unassertive in one group becoming assertive if the new group has his learning team’s name). This experiment is imperfect. But, given the implausibility of recreating a merger, this seemed like an interesting way to see what OID’s effect on individuals in a group in a post-merger setting would be.
Given managers have a certain degree of control of the name of a merged entity, an interesting observation would be to test to see what would happen if the merged entity takes on the name of company B, or if the merged entity takes on a new name, company C. Is the employee erosion somewhat mitigated by a merged name, or perhaps a new name all together?
What most intrigued me about this team's posting is the research question of whether or not the acquired company's culture is subsumed (Stockholm syndrome). My experience is that some aspects of both cultures are usually retained, so your proposition suggests that there is some good "tension" in this idea. Perhaps the more interesting angle would be to study which aspects of culture tend to stick and which ones tend to be subsumed. Where I'm headed is an idea that organizations have a sort of personality, too, and it would be interesting to test some of the interpersonal differences ideas in this broader context.
ReplyDeleteI think you experiment A seems very interesting. I’d be interested in gaining a better understanding of how the differences between merging companies' cultures effect mergers.
ReplyDeleteAssuming your hypothesis was correct, would the post merger integration collaboration “success rates” of high self monitors over low self monitors be less pronounced if the differences between organizational cultures were less?
Adrian, Bret, and Andrew,
ReplyDeleteWhen I read your follow-up comment, I was intrigued by the idea of examining names, and I got excited when you thought of applying the idea with Darden learning teams. It was not so much the Darden learning teams that got me excited as it was your ability to come up with a creative way to test a set of hypotheses at a fundamental and believable level. (And the other idea with actual companies has good potential too.)
Let me encourage you, when we get to our classes on identity and on power, to take these two ideas and develop them further in your blog posts on those days. On other days you may be generating new ideas, but on those two days, at least, you can develop existing ideas more deeply. What do you think?
Ryan
That sounds great. There seems to be a solid amount of secondary sources in both identity and power, so we should be able to understand it more fully before designing the experiment. There is an interesting study on Alumni and their Alma Mater (Mail and Ashforth, JOB, vol. 13, 103-123, 1992)which proposes a model of what drives orhanizational idenitfication based on college affiliation data. That may be important to consider when we frame the project because the learning teams don't have a reputational history or generations of a particular philosophy. Both appear (based on this study) to be important factors with identity in relation to an organization.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I remember those learning team days. After five nights a week for a few months and the odd group project, things are pretty set both for roles in the group and group identity as a unit. It would also be interesting to see if those roles carry over when you mix up the groups and control for the identity part to see if it influences roles. If they do carry over, perhaps it would provide data to inform what members from groups to put into transition teams in a post-merger environment. I wonder if when you merge teams in their entirety versus partially if the effect is different? That could be really interesting also.
All of that probably would be tough to get out of this study, so I think it would be great if we get more time to think through how best to design it. We would only get one chance to do it right until next year... I suppose we could do something with intramural teams as well to see if roles carry over post merger and how the name/identity affects collaboration, but the LT's seem a ton easier to coordinate.
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ReplyDeleteWould HSMs be acceptable survey participants? Aren't these the people who can change colors according to the needs of the situation? Would their answers reflect the real situation and reveal the necessary insights from your study? Although, I am not sure what an acceptable solution to this problem would be, but am willing to learn in the days ahead.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, although the research suggests that HSM's also tend to be highly aware of their relative standing and will walk if they feel under appreciated. If our hypothesis is that the power is in the hands of the acquiring company in post merger settings, then perhaps HSM's will walk when they realize the power is in the hands of the legacy members of the acquiring company and they will never be a full member of the dominant group. This could be especially important in a service business, or when there are creative or scientific "stars" that represent a portion of the value of the acquired company.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the implications could be (if our hypothesis is supported) that managers of acquiring companies will need to manage this perceived power dynamic so they don't lose the HSM stars in the acquired company during the integration or afterwards.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of the quantitate v. qualitative research conclusions, we may also be surprised to find that roles shift when the groups are split up and reformed with new members.
ReplyDelete