The authors used pre-post merger data from 599 employees experiencing a major corporate merger to compare 3 conceptual models based on the logic of social identity theory (SIT) and exchange theory to explain employees' merger responses. At issue is how perceived change in employees' own jobs and roles (i.e., personal valence) and perceived change in their organization's status and merger appropriateness (i.e., organizational valence) affect their changing organizational identification, attachment attitudes, and voluntary turnover. The first model suggests that organizational identification and organizational attachment develop independently and have distinct antecedents. The second model posits that organizational identification mediates the relationships between change in organizational and personal valence and change in attachment and turnover. The third model posits that change in personal valence moderates the relationship between changes in organizational valence and in organizational identification and attachment. Using latent difference score (LDS) modeling in an SEM framework and survival analysis, the results suggest an emergent fourth model that integrates the first and second models: Although change in organizational identification during the merger mediates the relationship between change in personal status and organizational valence and change in attachment, there is a direct and unmediated relationship between change in personal valence and attachment. This integrated model has implications for M&A theory and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social networks are not just patterns of interaction and sentiment in the real world; they are also cognitive (re)constructions of social relations, some real, some imagined. Focusing on networks as mental entities, our essay describes a new method that relies on stylized network images to gather quantitative data on how people "see" specific aspects of their social worlds. We discuss the logic of our approach, present several examples of "visual network scales," discuss some preliminary findings, and identify some of the problems and prospects in this nasc AU:2 ent line of work on the phenomenology of social networks.

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Recent transitions in the governance of urban stormwater, specifically developments that leverage the environmental and social benefits of green infrastructure (GI) including infiltration and neighborhood stabilization, often require capacities beyond those of any single municipal- or regional-scale organization. In many cities, transitions toward green stormwater infrastructure have been shepherded by networks of individuals spanning a diversity of organizations from governments to NGOs. These networks are often informal, that is, not established by legal mandate, governing authority, or formal agreement, and are often striking for their lack of formal hierarchy or formal leadership. Previous scholarship has revealed the importance of leadership in the development and efficacy of these multiorganizational, cross-sector environmental governance networks, but research has yet to empirically investigate and characterize informal network leaders within the context of GI for stormwater mitigation. To address this gap, we designed and administered a social network analysis (SNA) survey to individuals in a regional network of GI stormwater management professionals in and around Cleveland, Ohio USA. We collected network data on individual relationships, including collaboration and trust, and tested the impact of these relationships on peer-recognition of leaders in the GI network. Our findings suggest that network size, frequency of collaboration, and individual position within the network—specifically, betweenness centrality and openness—defined and likely supported leaders in the stormwater governance network. Leaders in this non-hierarchical, multi-institution context were more likely to be women and brokerage roles within the network benefitted women, not men, which contrasts with previous findings from research on single-organization and corporate networks. The implications of this research suggest that informal environmental governance networks, such as the GI network investigated, differ substantially from the generally more hierarchical networks of organizations. This finding is useful for municipalities and regional authorities grappling with complex environmental challenges, including transitions in strategies to manage excess stormwater for the protection of municipal drinking water sources and urban freshwater ecosystems.

The 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 reduce 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 15 million email communications between employees within two large merging consumer goods firms over 2 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.

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