Table 3.

Reinstated cooperative behavior

Category and first-order code	Illustrative data
Reinstated cooperative behavior
Descriptions that conveyed how staff were willing to engage with knowledge transfer activities	“There was the exceptionally high level of professionalism from the Ireland site when it came right down to it. People wanted their knowledge to live on, they wanted their partners [receiving sites] to be successful, and it was important to them to do a good job. And that drove a lot of the motivation.” (Respondent 10)
	“Of the 450 odd employees impacted by the Ireland exit, I would say easily 250, 300 were directly involved in transferring knowledge. And that may be as simple as phone conversations with the recipient, or it could be manufacturing guys on the line bringing teams around, showing them, training them. So, it was very much an employee led activity; employees were very much involved all the way... that’s the only way it could have been successful because the knowledge is certainly not centralized, it’s very broad.” (Respondent 3)
Statements that indicated objective of protecting and preserving company and staff interest	“We were under obligation to protect the company, its brand, its revenue, its profitability, and its assets. So, wearing the company hat on one side – and there’s a whole load of work that was happening to preserve that, and the second was about preserving and protecting the interests of the employees.” (Respondent 16)
	“People overall were very mature, very proactive, wanting to make sure that they did a good job of handing over the remaining activity. There were very few people that were disengaged. I could probably count them on one hand. To be honest, I think part of that is due to the way in which [Gamma] treated people. We went through extensive effort around giving people the opportunity to upskill, we developed a lot of training opportunities for people, we had subject experts coming in to provide training in lots of different areas.” (Respondent 12)
Reconfiguring incentives
Training and professional development	“We agreed at the very start of the consolidation program that we'd have a form of a social contract where we would focus on people’s wellbeing, education, training, financial advice, and put a very, very good suite of support programs in place. In turn, they [subsidiary employees] would support the business in terms of transferring programs.” (Respondent 5)
	“We supported everyone with training programs, education programs. We had a wellness program. We had parties, we had farewells. We had a very comprehensive program to make it a viable experience for people over a year and set them up for success.” (Respondent 17)
Additional financial incentives	“This is where we are. We still have 9 months of work that we need to do. A chunk will involve things that you might not like seeing, which is tearing down the machines and shipping them over to the other site. That’s the nature of the beast. The company is going to support you between now and then in certain ways. In return, what the company’s looking for is that you will also support them in terms of helping with knowledge transfer or doing transfers over a period of time… there were incentives included in that to make sure that people were motivated and to make sure this worked.” (Respondent 6)
	“There were incentives put in place for our site for people, so that people would remain engaged and do a good job in transferring that knowledge.” (Respondent 12)
Engage with emotions
Counselling	“Managers got plenty of support from an emotional point of view… Not everybody would openly talk about it [their feelings], but plenty did… That’s part of any therapy, that people see other people break down with that. Maybe they think they’re sad, then they see somebody stronger. Or they thought they were stronger, [but] broke down in a room full of people.” (Respondent 14)
	“Everybody could get one on one counselling sessions… we didn’t actually advertise the extent to which we were doing that upward [to headquarters management], because you don’t invite trouble.” (Respondent 16)
Reassuring	“The important thing I think in all of that was that you separate the strands of emotion and you address them all separately, right. So, the fear and anxiety about the future and their career, you get financial advisors in, which we did to help everybody on a one-to-one basis, figure out their money, how are they going to make ends meet. Anxiety around careers: a big drive on that, to say, hey, listen: you think you’ve nothing, no qualification? Of course you have. And then, because people totally underestimate their own worth and what they can bring to a company. So, you bring employers in, and you bring recruiters in, and you do all sorts of stuff that helps people believe that they do have value, that they do have something they can bring to the market. And so, we did a lot of that.” (Respondent 16)
	“I suppose there’s a curve of emotions that people go through… you’re still trying to do the right thing for them, be as flexible, ask them how they’re getting on, mental health, all that good stuff, it's important. I think people go through cycles like grief, people deal with it differently.” (Respondent 4)
Sensegiving for subsidiary identity
Reflection, inflection, and establishing a new narrative	“People internalized that this business is not doing well, and, to an extent, it was also reinforced by the local management. Explaining why a company is pulling out of a country can be best understood by looking at the macro financial picture and the macro business picture. So, we did spend a lot of time on that. We explained to people what was going on and why things were happening… it’s really a situation where authentic leadership is absolutely crucial and credibility is crucial.” (Respondent 17)
	“People could see that while the corporation had made a decision to cancel or close the site, the Ireland site and the leadership team had done a good job of securing, I suppose, extra recognition for the fact that people would have to do this in a context where they are knowingly losing their job and effectively training other people to do their job.” (Respondent 12)
Local leaders emphasizing tradition of site delivery	“We had spent years developing the infrastructure that made us valuable, that made us less expendable... We've done a great job, we've always done higher value add, higher development activity, we got out of manufacturing. [Plant Manager] actually pulled us out of manufacturing ahead of the curve. So, we've done an amazing job to still be here. But now, here we are, so let’s continue and let’s do it [subsidiary closure].” (Respondent 15)
	“The Ireland team is known for being quite aggressive. They’re known for delivering on commitments... [we] were able to get ownership for things like business insights and forecasting, we had a marketing team, we had a competitive intelligence team that we developed. So, all of those were started with seedlings of expertise and then they gradually grew.” (Respondent 7)
Informal one-to-ones and group sessions to reinforce sense of “we’re all in this together”	“We agreed to give people time. Communicate and have sessions openly talking about what has happened. If anybody needs to come to talk, then we’re here. Any questions at all, come back. Even if it was silence in the room, let people vent their frustration and what they’re frustrated at because that’s half the battle.” (Respondent 14)
	“Everyone rallied together and everyone helped each other out at that initial time anyway because we knew we were all in the same boat.” (Respondent 19)
Emotional enablers
Trust (in local leadership)	“Because everyone was being let go you felt okay, what you're saying [local management] is genuine and I trust you. You also knew that they [local management] were putting your interests ahead of their own a lot of the time, or that’s what it felt like because a lot of what they were doing was trying to help you. You knew they needed to help themselves as well, but it felt like they were putting the employees ahead of themselves.” (Respondent 19)
	“It was the local management that stepped up, and the corporate [managers] either did not have visibility or interest in driving all the touchy-feely stuff. They didn’t really care whether or not the local company arranged training in new careers, exit interviews, training. We did a big career fair. If it was down to the company, I'd say they wouldn’t have allowed that because we spent an arm and a leg on it.” (Respondent 16)
Sense of purpose	“There was an enticement, for the want of a better word, as many people as possible wanted to stay until the end purely because there was a body of work that we needed to complete out, and there was a project handover that we needed to complete with some of our west coast folks [receiving sites in U.S.]. And that was inclusive of tacit knowledge and also transfer of assets.” (Respondent 18)
	“There’s ways to do a shutdown, [but] when you’re part of it, it's quite an emotive topic, yes. I suppose the incentives were one piece, the financial incentives do give a bit of a blanket to people and give them a little bit of a justification in their own minds why they’re doing it. But they’re not the only thing...we had an amazing engagement model here where our engagement levels for the employees were quite high… we leveraged that engagement model and used that for the knowledge transfer and the site shutdown.” (Respondent 8)
Pride	“People took pride in what they did, and they were very proud of their work. So, when they were asked to transfer the knowledge, they felt it was a good opportunity... this is a way for me to wrap up everything that I've done, be proud of it, present it, and show the people that I'm a strong person, a strong employee, and I've done good work… It was like their baby. They'd built it from the ground up, so they wanted it to be successful.” (Respondent 19)
	“There was that real sense of wanting to do the best that we could from the engineers up. It’s hard to explain, and I don’t know if any other people have referred to that as well. But I would say 95% of people were fully engaged in the process after they had picked themselves up.” (Respondent 11)
Emotional barriers
Sad, upset	“People were very upset that they were going. The sadness thing is something that kind of came again and again because they [employees] had different dates for when people were leaving after they finished training somebody else in, or they finished up a line they'd leave. So every month or so a whole bunch of people would leave, and they'd be saying goodbye in some cases to people they had worked with for 20 years.” (Respondent 16)
	“There's that sense of dealing with those emotions of letting people down. Personal failure that this is happening on your watch and then just dealing with the uncertainty of where am I going to get a job? Have I got the skills? Each and every one of us has to go through that cycle ourselves.” (Respondent 17)
Legacy subsidiary identity
Some continuity in subsidiary identity	“One of the things that we [Ireland R&D team] had done really, really well for 10 or 15 years: we had a R&D charter, we were able to push programs very aggressively. We were good at measuring the risk and keeping things moving in an aggressive nature. We were handing over to the R&D site in [other subsidiary site]; they didn’t have that… it was a strange dynamic because the team, even though they were losing their jobs and getting very close to an end date, there was still an element of we can do this better than the receiving site… there was nearly an uplift in spirits to a certain degree, because there was a feeling of unity in that everybody was in it together. There was also a feeling of, we've pulled this off. We've done it, we stand proud that, as a site, we've done this handover very, very successfully, and we've done a really good job, and we've done ourselves proud.” (Respondent 13)
	“The biggest thing I suppose was the leadership team on site probably signing up to it: we’re going to do this, and the employees just followed through on it.” (Respondent 8)
Task-focused, narrower subsidiary identity	“I still have a duty to provide a service… what made the knowledge transfer successful was people just put so much work into it. They really did, and I think people knew that was the finish line. It was like, once I do this knowledge transfer that’s more or less my end, what's expected of me… it actually works out better because you get that closure and you feel like you can let it go then and you can dust yourself off. Okay, it’s done and you get that piece of closure.” (Respondent 19)
	“We’re not going to drop the ball on a major product that’s in the development cycle. We're going to support the knowledge transfer, and we’re going to go out with a bang.” (Respondent 17)