Repeated Downsizing: Attitudes and Well-being for Surviving Personnel in a Swedish Retail Company

Abstract

The study evaluates consequences of the major restructuring and downsizing of a large Swedish retail company. Efforts were made to investigate the impacts of perceived job insecurity, influence over the restructuring process, and perceived fairness of the process on well-being of remaining personnel, “survivors” of the process. A second aim was to investigate effects of repeated downsizing on work perceptions, attitudes and health of “survivors”. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire on two occasions with a 12-month interval. The response rate was 71% for survivors at Time 1 (n=555), and 71% again for survivors at Time 2 (n=395). Results indicated that the most important predictors of distress at Time 1 was perceived job insecurity and perceived participation in the process. Furthermore, that a new wave of organizational change between measurement occasions was associated with higher personal ratings of workload and lower ratings of job satisfaction, whereas mean distress scores remained unchanged. At Time 2 perceived insecurity together with experience from repeated downsizing were critical factors predicting distress symptoms.KeywordsDistress SymptomHealth ComplaintMajor RestructuringSignificant Univariate EffectHigh Distress LevelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.