Research

While prior research has examined organizational- and CEO-level antecedents to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) capabilities, less is known about how those below the CEO may shape the ways in which firms conduct acquisitions. In this study, I argue that Corporate Development Executives (CDEs), the specialized executives who lead M&A efforts inside companies, also play an important role in the M&A process. Through a hand-collected dataset on CDEs in S&P 500 information technology (IT) firms, I find an inverted U-shaped relationship between their prior M&A experience and subsequent M&A performance, and I document the conditions under which CDEs' M&A experience may complement or substitute that of the CEO and the firm. This study contributes to corporate strategy and organizational learning literatures by unveiling novel insights on the microfoundations of M&A capabilities.

Despite its importance, research on organizational structure witnessed a hiatus from the mid-1980s to the 2010s, primarily due to challenges in accessing and analyzing comprehensive multi-firm structural data. We address this lacuna by introducing a novel, meticulously hand-collected dataset of top management team (TMT) compositions of S&P 500 firms in the last three decades. Employing advanced generative AI models, we categorize executives’ titles into six role groups and 12 hierarchical levels, allowing easier comparisons of structures across firms. Our findings not only align with previous research but also offer deeper insights into industry-specific structural changes, functional distributions within organizations, and the evolution of executive roles over time. In addition, this work highlights the potential of generative AI in enriching empirical investigations of central strategy questions.

Acquisitions represent involuntary career transitions that fundamentally alter employee trajectories, yet little is known about how acquired employees’ (AEs’) prior experiences shape their post-acquisition outcomes. We define career similarity as the extent to which an AE’s career experiences resemble those of incumbent employees at the acquiring firm, and examine its influence on AEs’ turnover and promotion following technology acquisitions. We distinguish between professional affiliation similarity (PAS)—the degree to which an AE shares prior organizational affiliations with incumbents—and job experience similarity (JES)—the degree to which an AE’s functional experience mirrors that of incumbents. Using data on 2,127 acquisitions by S&P 500 IT firms (1995–2020) matched to 8.6 million LinkedIn profiles, we operationalize PAS and JES as cosine similarity vectors and estimate deal-stratified Cox models. We find that high PAS reduces promotion likelihood by 12.7%, while high JES lowers turnover risk by 3.6% and decreases promotion by 3.8%. These effects vary by function: business AEs with higher PAS face 8.2% higher turnover and 23.4% lower promotion rates, suggesting that social capital similarity generates perceived redundancy; conversely, JES serves as a protective factor for technical AEs who experience 9.1% lower turnover and 6.7% higher promotion rates, indicating the integrative benefits of human capital similarity in technological domains. Effects are accentuated in smaller, private acquisitions. Our findings advance careers, strategic human capital, and corporate strategy research by showing how ex-ante similarity shapes post-acquisition mobility, offering implications for AEs navigating career disruptions and managers seeking value creation from acquired human capital.