The paper reports a study of the post‐acquisition integration process in three foreign acquisitions made by Swedish multinationals. Detailed interview data and questionnaire responses in both acquiring and acquired firms are presented. The sub‐processes of task integration and human integration are separated out and it is shown that effective integration in these cases was achieved through a two‐phase process. In phase one, task integration led to a satisficing solution that limited the interaction between acquired and acquiring units, while human integration proceeded smoothly and led to cultural convergence and mutual respect. In phase two, there was renewed task integration built on the success of the human integration that had been achieved, which led to much greater interdependencies between acquired and acquiring units.

In this Retrospective, we summarise and discuss the findings of our 1999 JIBS paper ''Knowledge transfer in international acquisitions'', and we consider how research in this area has evolved over the last decade. The paper's key contribution was to show how the post-acquisition integration process in a sample of three international acquisitions led to the creation of a ''social community'', characterised by two-way knowledge-sharing between the acquirer and acquired companies. We discuss how the timing of this publication, as an early contribution to the knowledge-based perspective on the firm, helped its visibility; and we consider the boundary conditions around our findings.

T his paper reports on a study of external team learning activities and their performance effects. It proposes and tests a model that consists of two sets of external learning activities: those that allow a team to learn from external experienced others about its task (vicarious learning activities) and those that allow a team to learn from external sources about its context (contextual learning activities). Qualitative data from six teams in one pharmaceutical firm are used to develop measures. Survey data from 62 additional teams in six other pharmaceutical firms are used, first to test the measurement model using structural equation modeling and second to test the relationships between external learning activities and team performance using random-effects regression models. Results show that vicarious learning activities are more strongly associated with performance when teams engage in more internal learning activities. Furthermore, vicarious learning activities in the absence of sufficient amounts of internal learning activities can hurt performance. The positive performance associated with contextual learning activities, by contrast, is unaffected by the level of internal learning activities. The paper contributes by distinguishing between two kinds of external learning activities and showing that they put different demands on teams to be effective. This is important because it helps us better understand how teams engage effectively in learning activities across their boundaries.

This paper reports on a study of structural antecedents to team learning. In a study of self-managed pharmaceutical research and development teams, we first find that more team-level structure is associated with more internal learning as well as more external learning. We then establish that more organizational-level structure is negatively associated with both internal and external learning. We find that psychological safety mediates the positive relationship between team structure and team learning, and that task autonomy constraints mediate the negative relationship between organizational structure and team learning. Investigating the interaction effect between team and organizational structure, we find, unexpectedly, that organizational structure supports external team learning under conditions of less team structure. Specifically, when teams have less team structure, the relationship between organizational structure and external team learning is positive. This structure substitutability finding suggests that although more organizational structure, on average, hurts external team learning, there are situations in which it helps. An important implication of the study is that multiple levels of structure, and their interactions, should be taken into consideration when assessing structural effects on team learning.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract