The Pulse of Restructuring: How Acquisition and Divestiture Pace Shape Financial Performance in High-Technology Firms
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2025-07-08
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en
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Acquisitions and divestitures are key strategic tools, yet examining their pace and how changes in pacing dimensions (acceleration, balanced, deceleration) influence performance remains unaddressed in the literature. Existing studies focused on various temporal constructs but overlooked how restructuring pacing interacts with prior experience. Addressing this gap, this study investigates how acquisition and divestiture pace relate to financial performance and how restructuring experience moderates these relationships. The hypotheses were tested using a panel of 1,275 firm-year observations, covering 331 acquisitions and 398 divestitures conducted by 69 acquirers and 75 divestors from four high-technology industries between 2011 and 2021. While the predicted curvilinear effects are not supported, findings show that accelerated acquisition pace negatively affects performance, and that acquisition experience may mitigate this effect. No significant effects are found for divestiture pace or experience. This study contributes to organizational learning theory by showing that acquisition experience enables firms to maintain performance under accelerated restructuring. It advances the literature on temporal dynamics in strategic change by introducing a refined measure of restructuring pace and demonstrating its relevance across different pacing dimensions. These insights help managers align restructuring pace with experiential capacity and encourage future research on the timing of strategic change.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen