Employee Morale After Downsizing Downsizing has become a significant idea in today's economy and maintaining employee trust when something like this happens has also become a very serious business ( Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). The question is not whether a company should downsize its employees, but how to do that downsizing correctly so that as few employees as possible get injured (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994) . There are several ways that companies can downsize that will help retain much of the loyalty of remaining workers (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). Companies that scale through attrition and acquisitions, those companies that work to help laid-off employees find new jobs, and companies that are willing to provide outplacement services to these individuals often end up in much better positions than companies that they simply lay off workers due to downsizing (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). Those firms that demonstrate that they care about the workers they must remove through downsizing are more likely to retain much of the loyalty originally accorded them by the workers who survived the downsizing (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994 ). Trust is a very important resource for these companies, but it is very difficult to achieve and equally difficult to maintain (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). If companies are willing to downsize in a way that many workers consider very humane, they will fare better in the long term than companies that perceive workers as disposable (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin , & Bies, 1994). By the late 1970s, companies began to retrench workers (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). They did this to improve profits and also to cut many of the costs (Brockner, Konovsky, Cooper-Schneider, Folger, Martin, & Bies, 1994). Even though some companies today are making record profits, they carry forward the idea that they must be as lean as possible in order to compete (Brockner, Konovsky,...... middle of paper......tional Forms ? Organizational Science , 4, i-viDavidow W. H. & Malone, M. S. (1992). The virtual company New York: HarperCollins.Hirschhorn, L. & Gilmore, T. (1992).Harvard Business Review, 70: 104-115 portrait of downsizing survivors (1993) HR Focus, 70, 24. If you're going to downsize, says U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, "Do It Gently" Interview (1996). 123. Kets de Vries M. F. R. & Balazs, K. (1997). Smith, E. M. & Hedlund, J. (1993). Organizational downsizing: Strategies, interventions and research implications in C. L. Cooper and I. T. Robertson, eds., International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. New York: The Centrality of Trust. In R. M. Kramer and T. R. Tyler, eds., Trust in Organizations.' Frontiers of theory and research. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 261-287New York Times Special Report: The Downsizing of America. (1996). New York: Random House, 5.
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