The Role of Social Identity and Communities of Practice in Mergers and Acquisitions

Globally, organizations spend billions on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) each year; however, it is commonly estimated that at least half of these ventures fail. Two factors that contribute to this high failure rate are the difficulty in merging diverse areas of organizational knowledge and developing employees’ organizational identification with the post-M&A organization. In this article, we recommend the strategic use of organizational communities of practice (CoPs), groups where people share knowledge, to improve knowledge sharing within the post-M&A organization. We also argue that CoPs can indirectly increase knowledge sharing by easing M&A-triggered social identity concerns and fostering post-M&A organizational identification. We develop conceptual propositions for the relationships between CoPs participation, organizational identification, and knowledge sharing in the post-M&A organization. We also argue that the extent to which CoPs participation can increase organizational identification and knowledge sharing will depend on the post-M&A organization’s overall business strategy and whether it is primarily concerned with explicit or tacit knowledge.

The different roles of relative ingroup prototypicality in the outgroup attitudes of majority and minority groups

Based on the argument that the ingroup projection model may not be applicable to the minority group when addressing the effect of relative ingroup prototypicality (RIP) on outgroup attitudes, two studies investigated whether RIP and its effects on outgroup attitudes differ for the majority (Han) and an ethnic minority group (Tibetan). We measured RIP and outgroup attitudes in Study 1 ( N = 164) and manipulated RIP in Study 2 ( N = 145). The results indicated that the Hans presented high RIP, whereas the Tibetans presented low RIP. The effects of RIP on outgroup attitudes were moderated by group size: High RIP among Hans resulted in negative outgroup attitudes, whereas high RIP among Tibetans led to positive outgroup attitudes. These findings imply that improving the minority group’s RIP by making its culture prototypicality equal to that of the majority group would lead to positive outgroup attitudes.