Managing post-acquisition operating performance can be challenging because synergy extraction entails changes and must be balanced with disruption to the organizational units involved. While prior literature has focused on organization-level factors (such as knowledge similarity and team design), in this paper I shift the focus to individual-level factors–specifically the social skills of employees–that help in achieving this balance. I argue that increased hiring for social skills, such as communication, negotiation, and teamwork, after an acquisition helps manage disruptions by enabling improved inter-unit collaboration between the acquirer and target units. To test the argument, I use a stacked differences-in-differences design to analyze data from approximately 5.3k acquisitions (SDC), 26 million job listings to measure social skills hiring (Lightcast), 22k senior manager profiles (Boardex), and 2,739 US public firms (Compustat), tracked quarterly in the period 2010-2020. I find that a 25 percent increase in average social skills at the acquiring firm is correlated with a 3.1 percentage point mitigation of post-acquisition operating performance drop. For deals with a large increase in distinct organizational units or delayed target integration, both of which imply a higher need for inter-unit collaboration, increased social skills are correlated with higher mitigation of 5.1-11.5 points–providing support for the proposed mechanism. Through these findings, I contribute to research on post-acquisition integration, offering insights into the structure-human capital dynamics in enabling organizational collaboration. 

Observers of novel, technology-enabled forms of organizing have argued that digital technologies enable effective decentralization and can, therefore, reduce reliance on managers in organizations. However, systematic evidence has been scarce, and countervailing narratives exist that portray digital technologies as increasing the degree of coercion and control of subordinates by managers (i.e., “Digital Taylorism”). We develop a theoretical explanation for why digital collaboration technologies (DCTs) should lower managerial intensity and increase decentralization in organizations. To test this argument, we apply a differences-in-differences design on a novel dataset built from over 26 million job listings (Lightcast) and over 20 million social profiles (Revelio) matched to 3,017 US public firms in Compustat, which we track in the period 2010-2019. We find that over the observation window, DCT adopters show a 3% reduction in managerial intensity and a 5-7% increase in non-managerial skills linked to decentralization in their job postings in the years following adoption. The pattern of results is robust to a battery of alternative measures and specifications and strongly supports the idea that DCTs make organizations less hierarchical along the dimensions we studied.

Remote work intensifies communication silos, which is a problem for organizations as it is rarely feasible to perfectly organize interdependencies within them. In this paper, I explore solutions and ask: what organizations can do to overcome silo intensification challenges? I leverage open-source software communities as the context–these are all-remote organizations where contributors carry out software development. By using email metadata and text from the Linux-kernel open-source project, I find that motivational differences exist among open-source contributors that are also correlated with their propensity to undertake distant interactions. Overall, the Linux-kernel organization exhibits the existence of timezone silos–with a 19.3 percent reduction in interactions with those in distant timezones versus those nearby. However, volunteers, unpaid for their work and motivated by recognition and knowledge, show a lower drop in distant interactions, by 12.7 percentage points, as compared to firm-sponsored contributors. Moreover, the estimated difference is even higher for volunteers with lower recognition and knowledge–consistent with the March (1991) idea that those with low accomplishments are more likely to explore, strengthening belief in the motivational mechanism. Broadly, these differences, observed in the behavior of volunteers and firm-sponsored contributors, help understand the characteristics of workers that make them more likely to span internal organizational boundaries.