Firms often undertake acquisitions to gain access to new knowledge, but they can differ dramatically in how they leverage acquired knowledge. The findings of this paper suggest that pre-acquisition innovation capabilities are distinct from but influence the post-acquisition innovation actions. In addition, the firm’s prior acquisition rate moderates the relationship between the acquiring firms’ previous exploitation or exploration orientation and their knowledge leverage mode. In contrast, the degree of exploration of acquirers increases the likelihood that new innovations will use acquired knowledge without integrating it with their prior knowledge. The degree of exploitation of acquirers promotes integrating their existing knowledge with acquired knowledge in innovative actions. We address how the prior exploitation or exploration orientation of acquirers influence these two modes of knowledge leverage behaviors. We identify two types of knowledge leverage behaviors undertaken by acquiring firms: integrated and independent knowledge leverage. Our findings contribute to our understanding of post-acquisition integration dynamics by recasting the integration process as embedded in a set of co-evolving processes that shape its unfolding. We highlight four mechanisms (coordination, cohesion, disconnection, alienation) that arise from the co-evolution of processes that either facilitate or impede integration. We find that post-acquisition integration is embedded in a set of co-evolving processes.
Through a qualitative, longitudinal study conducted over three years, we carried out 151 interviews to uncover the unfolding of the post-acquisition process. To further understand this embeddedness we examine the unfolding of a post-acquisition integration process in a company faced with an unanticipated drop in demand due to the global economic crisis. We contend that post-acquisition integration is not detached from other simultaneous change processes in the organizational context and this has important implications for our understanding of how integration dynamics actually evolve. However this ignores that this process rarely unfolds as the only ongoing initiative in an organization. M&A scholars have generally assumed that post-acquisition integration is a self-contained process. Sufficient culture and human due diligence prior to the acquisition is found to significantly moderate the impact of high cultural differences. National culture differences are found to have a stronger negative effect than organizational culture differences on synergy realization. The results indicate that both national and organizational culture differences exert a negative impact on the realization of implicit synergies while no impact on the realization of explicit synergies. Our analysis is based on a unique survey on a sample of 103 cross-border acquisitions. Drawing from cross-cultural interaction and inter-organizational learning arguments, we further propose idiosyncratic effects of cultural differences in different synergy realization contexts, where we contrast explicit with implicit synergy realization. Focusing on synergy realization in CBAs and applying a process and conditional perspective, we propose the relationship between national and organizational culture differences with synergy realization to be moderated by the quality and extent of due diligence and post-acquisition coordination. While tied to the purpose and consequences of an acquisition that challenges practitioners, synergy realization has not received much attention in researching on culture-performance relationship. Research on cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) consistently recognizes the importance of cultural differences, yet it lacks consensus on whether it has a positive or negative impact.
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