Middle Managers’ Relational Dynamics in the Context of Acquisitions: Balancing Strategic Interdependence and Organizational Autonomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During acquisitions, middle managers (MMs) play a crucial role in facilitating the integration of two previously separate organizations, thereby facing the challenge of balancing competing needs for strategic interdependence and organizational autonomy. Drawing on interviews with acquiring and acquired MMs, this study explores the unfolding dynamics of framing the relationships between both groups. We introduce the concept of actionable intersubjectivity as a core ability of MMs to take into account the presence of the other while accomplishing integration tasks. We propose a grounded process model that traces how actionable intersubjectivity is developed to varying degrees throughout the MMs’ relational dynamics occurring in the various interaction spaces provided at each acquisition stage by getting a sense of the other (pre‐acquisition), by deciphering how the other think (approval), by experiencing how the other act and react (post‐acquisition I) and by putting oneself in the place of the other (post‐acquisition II). Our paper contributes to mergers and acquisitions research in two ways: (1) by unpacking the relational dynamics between MMs and introducing actionable intersubjectivity as a crucial ability in the context of acquisitions and (2) by extending our understanding of MMs’ role in balancing strategic interdependence and organizational autonomy during the acquisition process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".