Balancing the Personal and the Organizational: Shifting Focus of Frontline Sense-making

Abstract

We still lack a proper understanding of how mergers politicize. To answer this, we conducted a longitudinal study at a large medical technology hardware and software provider MedTech. Our findings show how frontline management sensemaking plays a crucial role in merger politicization: their perceptions of top management legitimacy influence whether their sensemaking and actions primarily concern organizational or personal welfare. When frontline managers' perception of top management decision-making shifts towards more political, the focus of their sensemaking shifts from organization-focused to self-focused. This shift then leads to employees finding new and creative ways to save themselves, i.e., various increasingly political actions. While initial political actions against top management decisions aim to benefit the organization (e.g., to reverse an erroneous decision), the self-focused political actions are indifferent towards their organizational consequences. Hence, while organization-focused political actions can benefit merger success, self-focused political actions contribute to merger failure. Our findings contribute to the research on mergers and postmerger integration by proposing how frontline sensemaking influences merger politicization and to research on organizational politics by showing how perceptions of political decisions lead to the escalation of political behaviors.