Birollo et al. (2024), Journal of Management Studies

Middle Managers’ Relational Dynamics in the Context of Acquisitions: Balancing Strategic Interdependence and Organizational Autonomy

Name: Atlas of the Middle summary and grade: Birollo et al. (2024)
Item: Middle Managers’ Relational Dynamics in the Context of Acquisitions: Balancing Strategic Interdependence and Organizational Autonomy
Rating: 2

During acquisitions, middle managers on both sides developed, to varying degrees, an ability to take the other side into account while doing integration work, built up across stages of the deal.

Parts of the Loop it informs

Make sense together, top includedMixed

Read the original paper

Summary written by Unfrozen from the published abstract, then checked twice against the source. Loop coding is exploratory and provisional until an independent human coder checks it. Spot an error? Email [email protected] and it gets fixed.

Related studies

Franck et al. (2025)Middle managers handled their teams' negative emotions about top-down strategy in meetings through a sequence: understanding emotions, tuning in, then encouraging reappraisal.Outila et al. (2020)Middle managers in a Russian subsidiary used proverbs to reconcile an imported 'western' empowerment concept with local ideals of good management, acting as both translators and implementers.Woiceshyn et al. (2019)Hospital units implemented planned change better or worse depending on day-to-day activities and interactions between unit managers and nursing staff, which set off virtuous or vicious change cycles.Alfoldi et al. (2017)At Unilever, regional mandates given to subsidiaries proved ambiguous; several units negotiated what they meant and reshaped their scope over time, with boundary-spanning middle managers doing the most intense sensemaking.