5 research outputs found
Turnover During a Corporate Merger: How Workplace Network Change Influences Staying
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Psychological Association via the DOI in this recordThe upheaval created by a merger can precipitate voluntary employee turnover, causing merging
organizations to lose valuable knowledge-based resources and competencies precisely when they
are needed most to achieve the merger’s integration goals. While prior research has shown that
employees' connections to coworkers reduces their likelihood of leaving, we know little about
how personal social networks should change to increase the likelihood of staying through the
disruptive post-merger integration period. In a pre-post study of social network change, we
investigate over fifteen million email communications between employees within two large
merging consumer goods firms over two years. We use insights from network activation theory
to posit and find that employees with high formal power (rank) and high informal status
(indegree centrality) react to the merger's general uncertainty and threat by developing new
social connections in a manner indicative of a network widening response: reaching out and
connecting with those in the counterpart legacy organization. We also investigate whether
increased personally-felt threat in the form of merger-related job insecurity strengthens these
relationships, finding it does in the case of high formal power. We also find that employees
increasing their cross-legacy social connections is key in reducing those employees' turnover
after a merger. Our study suggests that network activation theory can be extended to explain
network changes and not simply network cognition