Abstract
AbstractDownsizing is widely assumed to detrimentally affect surviving employees' engagement and health through increased demands and decreased resources. Building on job demands–resources theory, we assess whether these effects occur and whether job demands and resources moderate the detrimental effects of downsizing on employee health and engagement. We conceptualize downsizing as a stressor event, and we explain its relationship with employee health through the job demands work overload and job insecurity are (two) job demands, as well as its relationship with employee engagement through the job resources supervisor support and opportunities for development are job resources. Using data from two large representative samples of German employees, we show that job demands mediate the negative relationship between downsizing and employees' psychological and physical health and that job resources mediate the negative relationship between downsizing and engagement. We find little support for the assumption that job resources alleviate the indirect effects of downsizing on surviving employees' health, or that job demands strengthen the indirect effects of downsizing on surviving employees' engagement. We discuss how these findings expand our understanding of downsizing and outline practical implications for human resource practitioners.
Highlights
Workforce downsizing is one of the most significant topics in the area of human resource management
There was a significant indirect effect of downsizing on physical health through work overload (IE = −0.04, 95% CI [−0.08, −0.00]); the bound of the confidence interval was rounded to .00 but did not include zero
Following job demands–resources (JD-R) theory (Demerouti et al, 2001), we expected that a decrease in job resources would mediate the relationship between downsizing and engagement, and that an increase in job demands would mediate the relationship between downsizing and strain
Summary
Workforce downsizing is one of the most significant topics in the area of human resource management. Research on reactions of these employees, who are termed “downsizing survivors,” has shown that downsizing negatively affects their attitudes (Allen, Freeman, Russell, Reizenstein, & Rentz, 2001; Luthans & Sommer, 1999; Travaglione & Cross, 2006) and health (Grunberg, Moore, & Greenberg, 2001; Kivimäki et al, 2001; Snorradóttir, Vilhjálmsson, Rafnsdóttir, & Tómasson, 2013). Some studies have taken a stress perspective toward downsizing, showing that this organizational event increases surviving employees' job demands and negatively affects their health It is typically assumed that changes in surviving employees' motivation and health after downsizing are due to changes in job demands and job resources, but in most cases, these relationships have not been explicitly tested. Few studies have tested the effect of a downsizing event in representative samples that include survivors and a comparison group
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