This conceptual paper aims at exploring the role of organizational unlearning in postacquisition integration. While M&A are frequently pursued for learning and knowledge acquisition motives, they often fall short of delivering on the initial promises due to failures in post-acquisition integration. Previous research unfolded that post-acquisition performance depends on the organizational fit between two organizations. Yet, we know relatively little about how the integration of the acquired firm has to be managed in order to overcome problems of organizational fit. Therefore, we investigate the role of organizational unlearning in reconciling organizational misfit in post-acquisition integration. Our arguments suggest that especially in cases of fundamental differences in belief systems organizational unlearning fosters postacquisition performance and knowledge transfer.
We introduce a new notion to research on firms' communication: communication as executive teamwork. Specifically, we combine the capital market literature with psychology and cognitive linguistics to argue that analysts issue more favorable firm recommendations if the respective CEOs and CFOs act consistently with analysts' role stereotypes regarding these executives. Furthermore, we suggest that firms receive more favorable analyst recommendations to the extent that CEOs and CFOs behave consistently with analysts' stereotypes regarding how the CEO and CFO of a given executive team relate to each other. We conceptualize CEOs' and CFOs' role consistency via those managers' linguistic tone and their use of emotional and rational words. We find support for our hypotheses, but also counterintuitive results, when testing them on a sample of 78 CEO-CFO teams including 934 observations between 2002 and 2011. We also find that "rhetorical distance," i.e., heterogeneous, rather than homogeneous, CEO and CFO communication, fosters analysts' benevolence. Although exploratory in nature, our findings suggest that executive communication is more successful when CEOs, CFOs, and other members of the executive suite envisage themselves more as members of a complementary communication ensemble rather than as individual soloists.
Researchers increasingly discuss social embeddedness's role in new product development success. Recent studies provide evidence of an inverted u-shape relationship between embeddedness and initiative performance, but fail to develop a theoretical understanding of how senior managers can establish new product development teams with beneficial intermediate levels of social embeddedness. On the basis of an inductive study of six new product development teams at a leading automotive manufacturer, we derive five dimensions of intra-organizational context mechanisms as managerial means to influence structural, positional, relational, and cognitive embeddedness. Further, we develop theoretical insights into how senior managers can establish new product development teams with intermediate levels of embeddedness by deploying some of these context mechanisms to strengthen embeddedness, while others are used as a counterbalance to avoid over-embeddedness.
This paper develops propositions that try to establish a link between the organizational design characteristics of the collaborative research teams and the different innovation types and their interaction effect on the outcome of the collaborative New Product Development (NPD) process. It will be argued that structural separation of the collaborative research unit and radical innovations as well as structural integration and incremental innovations will have a positive interaction effect on the NPD project outcome. Furthermore, heavyweight teams as well as autonomous teams together with market disrupting innovations and lightweight teams together with market sustaining innovations will be introduced as having a positive interaction effect on the collaborative NPD outcome. The contingency factor of the environment will be introduced as a moderator on the interaction effect. Thus, the framework introduced in the paper offers a new perspective on the phenomenon of NPD collaboration and has implications for management practice.
This paper develops propositions that try to establish a link between the micropolitical variables of power and incremental planning and the outcome of the collaborative New Product Development (NPD) process. It will be argued that power balances and imbalances among the actors involved in the product development process will influence the outcome of the NPD project, and that in particular high power bases of one actor and micropolitical behavior of the low-power actor both negatively influence the success of NPD projects. It will therefore be argued that the power construct has an inverted U-shaped effect on the outcome of the NPD process. Furthermore, incremental strategy making will be introduced as having a positive influence on NPD projects. Thus, the framework introduced in the paper offers a new perspective on the phenomenon of NPD collaboration and has implications for management practice.
