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

Because knowledge is often embedded in employees, the mobility of R&D workers is a primary concern in acquisitions in knowledge-intensive industries. While the reasons for post-acquisition mobility of R&D workers have been widely studied, the focuses has been on the acquirers’ characteristics or on the acquirer-target dyad’s characteristics. How the target’s characteristics affect the retention of R&D workers in acquisition targets is poorly understood. Extending the idea that employees’ mobility is limited by the embeddedness of their knowledge within a team, we theorize that R&D workers’ post-acquisition mobility is contingent on the R&D teams’ diversity and the uniqueness of a R&D worker’s knowledge within the team prior to acquisition. By investigating a target characteristics that changes with the acquisition, this study presents an alternative way of understanding why R&D workers leave post-acquisition and which knowledge resources are retained within the target after being acquired.