Effective enactment of acquisition-integration heuristics: An organizational learning perspective

Acquisition integration remains one of the most complex and failure-prone phases of the acquisition process. Thus, understanding how organizations develop effective acquisition capabilities is vital. The simple rule perspective identifies heuristics as microfoundational building blocks of acquisition capabilities. This study contributes to this literature by shifting the focus from heuristic development to the problem of effective enactment across multiple actors. Drawing on a case study of a serial acquirer in the European food industry, we demonstrate how the composition of acquisition-integration heuristic portfolios affects their enactability. Heuristic portfolio congruence (alignment around a shared acquisition-integration rationale) and consistency (a stable pattern of acquisition-integration actions across actors and stages) are key for enactment by establishing complementarity among different types of heuristics. In addition, our findings show that the enactability of heuristic portfolios is shaped by experiential, vicarious, and inferential learning. Heuristics derived from experiential learning become cognitively legitimate and routinized, whereas those developed through vicarious and inferential learning may remain fragile because articulation and codification are more prone to causal and contextual knowledge decay in such contexts. Organizational legacy acts as an enactment filter, marginalizing new heuristics under conditions of integration pressure. These findings reframe organizational learning as a process of selective enactment, whereby organizational success can inadvertently produce rigidity in the enactment of new heuristics.