Team Diversity and the Mobility of R&D Workers after Acquisitions

Since knowledge is often embedded in employees, R&D worker mo-bility is a primary concern in the context of acquisitions in knowledge-intensive industries. While the reasons for post-acquisition mobility of R&D workers are widely studied, the premise of extant work is that em-ployees have homogenous outside opportunities and that the mobility is determined by the characteristics of the acquirer or the acquirer-target dyad. In this paper we investigate how the characteristics of R&D workers and their embeddedness in teams in the acquisition target affect post-acquisition mobility. We find great heterogeneity in the firm-specificity of R&D workers’ human capital which affects their postacquisition mobili-ty. We find also that R&D workers’ post-acquisition mobility is prede-termined largely by the organizational design of the target prior to acqui-sition, specifically R&D team diversity.