I still recognize your evidence as being either anecdotal (what I originally responded to) or very limited and short term (your Bear Stearns - half of their concern isn't just losing their job, it's that 1/3 of the company is owned by employees and they stand to lose life savings over a buyout like this!). This is hardly comparable to the Firaxis buyout, or even a normal situation for a buyout of this type.
Your reasoning doesn't hold water. Since they have more at stake, Bear employees should have even more incentive to work hard. Yet it's clear they're spending a lot of otherwise productive time considering things like finding another buyer, contemplating legal action, meeting with their new bosses at JP Morgan, etc. Even those who want to work hard cannot do so since, as the article points out, JP Morgan employees have assumed many of the positions formerly manned by Bear employees.
Conversely, if your assumption is correct, T2 employees have less at stake (and are consequently less likely to work harder) since they're not about to lose their life savings.
What's more, tThere have been studies done showing consistent increases in productivity as a result of buyouts.
In fact, here's one such study, conducted in Australia, showing marked increases in productivity in a majority of the surveyed companies which had gone through buyouts.
http://www.meyrick.com.au/html4/Docs2/AVCAL_Meyrick_LabourProductivity_062304.pdf
The study you cite is irrelevant since it makes it clear in its very first paragraph that it is an analysis of
management buyouts, which is the case in neither the Bear nor T2 situations. The study was clearly designed to show that employees are more productive when their managers become their owners -- also the case in neither the Bear nor T2 situations.
The Bear Stearns issue more or less assures that upwards of 50% of the employees will be laid off, meaning most of these people have effectively already lost their jobs and there is no possibility of the competition to keep jobs which I'm describing...
But it's not been decided
which 50% will lose their jobs. The article makes clear that "JPMorgan executives plan to cull one Bear employee after another." So, by your reasoning, there should still be quite a bit of motivation for competition. Yet, again, such is not the case since JP Morgan is so concerned that the best employees will leave, JP Morgan's CEO "told the executives that those of them who stay might receive at least 25 percent of the value of their recent Bear stock awards in the form of JPMorgan shares [and] those who stay until the deal closes will receive a one-time cash payment." Such incentives are typical in acquisitions and hardly constitute what you insist is an "abnormal case to go against a general rule."
Further, the whole point of the discussion is not whether employees who may lose their job are ready, willing and able to work harder. The point is that employees have difficulty doing so when they are distracted by the upheaval caused by a sale -- or reports of a potential sale -- of their company.
Whereas EA has a long history of keeping successful studios largely intact.
Clearly that's what EA would want. But if you read the initial article I cited, you'll see that "Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said that Electronic Arts decision to go hostile could cause it some problems with Take-Twos creative teams. He said that game development studios, like Rockstar Games, which makes Grand Theft Auto, may not stick around to work for Electronic Arts."
Again, the issue is not how hard employees work when confronted with a sale, real or potential. Rather, the issue is how productive employees
can be when confronted with the distractions such a sale brings. The turmoil that Bear employees are going through is very typical of what happens when a company is sold. Whether, as your cited study analyzes, employees are more productive when their managers buy the company -- and they don't stand to lose their jobs -- is inapplicable to the case at hand.
