Although employees' willingness to cooperate is acknowledged as a critical success factor for post-M&A (merger-and-acquisition) integration, we still know little about the psychological mechanisms that lie beneath employees' cooperative attitudes and behaviors in this context. Building on the premises of fairness heuristic theory, this longitudinal study explores how the relative importance of distributive and procedural justice judgments for employees' willingness to cooperate shifts over time. We suggest that when employees lack justice-relevant information on both distributive and procedural aspects of decisions, they will use another temporary heuristic to reduce uncertainty by scrutinizing the M&A-related cooperative behaviors of authority fi gures. We test our hypotheses on data from a four-time repeated cross-sectional survey of employee responses in a post-M&A integration process. The fi ndings provide important insights into how merging fi rms can enhance employees' willingness to cooperate through the subtle exercise of justice and exemplarity.

Building on fairness heuristic theory and dual-process theories of cognition, we examine individuals' perceptions of phase shifting. We define phase shifting as an individual perception that triggers a shift from type 1 to type 2 cognitive processes resulting in the reevaluation of justice judgments. In a longitudinal study of a merger, we empirically test the influence of phase-shifting perceptions on justice judgments, and we identify antecedents of phase-shifting perceptions. We find employees' perceptions of the change as a phase-shifting event moderates the relationship between overall justice judgments prior to change (time 1), and subsequent assessments of justice six months later (time 2). We study three situational antecedents (i.e., magnitude of change, managerial exemplarity, and coworker support for change) and one individual antecedent (i.e., dispositional resistance to change) of phase-shifting perceptions. The four hypothesized antecedents together predict 74% of employees' perceptions of the merger as a phase-shifting event. Implications for research and practice regarding organizational justice and organizational change are discussed.We are thankful to the APICIL Company and the Gordon J. Barnett Foundation for their support of this research.

No abstract

No abstract

Developing teams capable of completing projects in extreme situations is becoming a major challenge for a growing number of organizations. The notion of collective competence is increasingly being seen as a vital precondition for the success of project teams, particularly in extreme environments. However, we still know little about the ingredients of this collective competence. To partially fill this gap, we make use of the insights offered by the very particular world of the French Special Forces, which have been operating successfully for several decades in extreme environments. Based on an in‐depth qualitative study of their project‐based mode of operations, we detail the six main ingredients of the collective competence that underpins the activities of commando units in the field and insist upon the criticality of the pre‐ and postmission phases during which this collective competence is actively reinforced.