Research

Collaborations with a target's partners often fade after an acquisition, yet they are a reason to acquire. Protection-motivated acquirers see collaboration intensify; extraction-motivated acquirers, after code or talent, see it decline.

What role do collaborations with a target's partners play in an acquisition, and how do these collaborations evolve post-acquisition? Research suggests that these collaborations are an important reason to acquire but often diminish post-acquisition. But if they tend to diminish, why are they a reason to acquire? Our analysis of acquirers' motives of 143 acquisitions of firms that collaborate with partners on 298 open-source projects resolves the outlined puzzle and reveals two types of acquisition motives: protection-motivated acquisitions, where acquirers focus on protecting the complementarity with the technology and the partners, and extraction-motivated acquisitions, where acquirers focus on extracting technology and employees. We find that protection-motivated acquisitions are associated with an intensification of collaborations, meanwhile extraction-motivated acquisitions are associated with a diminishment of the collaboration. We contribute to research on acquisitions, collaboration, and OSS.

Decentralized organizations rely on deliberation to do what a manager would otherwise do. Whether a group then outperforms its average member, or its best, depends on how its network channels informational against normative influence.

Organizations often rely on deliberative groups (committees, taskforces, boards) to make decisions, yet deliberation's effectiveness remains contested. When can deliberation help a group outperform the average or even the best individual in the group? We propose that the value of deliberation depends on how the network structure of the group shapes informational influence (which promotes updating beliefs based on perceived expertise) and normative influence (which drives conformity to gain social approval). Using an agent-based model, we show that deliberation can help groups achieve strong synergy effects (i.e. outperform the best individual in the group) if members typically recognize each other's relative expertise at better than chance levels, and when the network structure neither isolates any members nor allows for clustering and cliques. Moreover, introducing a few actors into the network who are impervious to conformity (such as AI agents) can improve group decision quality even if these actors are no better than random chance at recognizing expertise. We draw implications for how to compose and structure group deliberation processes to improve the chances of obtaining effective decisions.

Members about to be evaluated take part in more peer evaluations while choosing carefully which ones. Firms that adopt peer evaluation should expect it to be gamed in predictable ways.

Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting which evaluations they participate in. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic.

Monitored subordinates search more than they otherwise would, to show visible effort. That points to a hidden cost of flat designs: without monitoring, employees explore less.

In this article, we explore the effects of managerial monitoring on the behavior of subordinates tasked with the search for alternatives in a complex environment. We argue that managerial monitoring will lead subordinates to exhibit more search than they would engage in otherwise as they try to impress their superiors by exerting more effort. We test and confirm our hypothesis in four laboratory studies with a total of 444 participants. Our findings show that search distance and duration are highly susceptible to managerial monitoring, whereas similar interventions from peers and subordinates are ineffective.

Why does anyone accept being overruled by someone with no formal power over them? Lateral authority can settle coordination conflicts without the motivational cost that hierarchy usually imposes.

We investigate the conditions under which authority can be deployed without reducing subordinate motivation. We show that lateral authority, the legitimacy to resolve task-specific problems, is welcomed by members of an organization in the resolution of coordination conflicts, the more so (a) the fiercer the conflict to be resolved, (b) the higher the competence-based status of the authority, (c) the lower the tenure of, and (d) the more focused the organizational members are. Analyzing the discussion behavior of members of Wikipedia between 2002 and 2014, we corroborate our allegations empirically by analyzing 642,916 article–discussion pages. Our findings, obtained for a modern collective production community, provide learning opportunities for how traditional organizations may want to govern activities of their idiosyncratically motivated staff.

Access to an open resource, as part of a bundle, can give control without ownership, which changes what competitive advantage rests on when innovation is open.

Strategic openness (firms voluntarily forfeiting control over resources) seemingly challenges the premise of the resource-based view (RBV), which posits that firms should control valuable, rare, and inimitable (VRI) resources. We reconcile this apparent paradox by formalizing whether and when firms, consisting of resource bundles and deriving competitive advantage from exploiting selected VRI resources, may maximize profitability by opening parts of their resource base. As such, our article refines RBV-related thinking while supporting the theory's core tenets. Notably, we illustrate how a common-pool resource can become a source of competitive advantage and how firms may use openness to shape inter-firm competition.