اثرات سیاست های کوچک سازی در نگرش بازماندگان IS و مدیریت شغلی

The effects of downsizing strategies on surviving system personnel have received scant attention in the IS literature. This paper reports a study of IS survivors, the employment practices of the organizations, the attitudes of the survivors toward downsizing, and the career management practices of the survivors. The results indicate that the downsizing practice has a strong relationship with survivor attitudes and the practices survivors use in managing their careers. Specifically, indirect downsizing methods tend to avoid negative attitudes and promote career management strategies more beneficial to the organization.

Driven by top management interest in cost reduction, information system (IS) downsizing the deliberate organizational decision to reduce workforce size is one of the most significant phenomena in IS resources management in the 1990s. Firms downsizing their IS departments report significant budget reduction and other benefits [6], [39], [66] and [71]. Despite growing top management interest, little is known about the impact of the IS downsizing policies and its process implementation on IS survivors. From a practical perspective, as the downsizing process shifts from consideration of organizational level issues toward the individual affected by the process (survivors), efforts to manage the transition through intervention and to alleviate the impact on personnel come into focus. Downsizing strategies refer to the methods employed to accomplish a workforce reduction. Means have included early retirement, attrition without replacement, outplacement, and layoffs. These approaches differ in their speed of achieving the goal of workforce reduction, the degree to which the organization retains control, and the negative effects on employees [46]. Once the downsizing strategy has been identified, the process must be implemented and managed. Key issues concern the reduction of uncertainty through extensive communication and the implementation of interventions designed to aid and support both terminated personnel and survivors. The goal is to help both terminated employees and survivors accept the process and prepare for new roles. Although much literature on downsizing has been written over the last decade, technical professionals including IS personnel are generally overlooked. Existing studies are limited to determination of downsizing success in the IS department [67] and factors in perceived success [68]. Apparently, none has investigated the impact on the attitudes and future career strategies of the survivors of an IS downsizing, though it has been done in other fields. What are the IS survivors’ attitudes toward downsizing and how do they affect survivors’ career management strategies in the downsized workplace? Are these attitudes and strategies altered by the organizational downsizing strategy and intervention processes? These are important questions, as a key element of success is that downsizing is perceived positively by the employees as a purposeful organizational response to achieve its objectives [13], [38], [45], [51] and [64].

The explicit test in this paper is that the downsizing process that proceeds from organizational level considerations has individual level impacts. The results provide managers with insights into how to administer layoffs so as to elicit from survivors the most positive (or least negative) behavioral and attitudinal reactions. Downsizing efforts are often poorly planned and ineffective for organizations which are forced into crisis situations which necessitate immediate personnel cut-backs to generate savings. On the other hand, organizations incorporating a variety of downsizing strategies linked to long-range strategic objectives preserve distinctive and critical competencies. Fairness perception is also important to the survivors, as reflected in the indirect methods encouraging internal career strategies. Employees are more likely to judge a downsizing as justified when: (1) workers received adequate advanced notice, (2) employees are treated with dignity and respect during the downsizing, (3) management must provide a clear, adequate explanation of the reasons for the layoffs, where taking the time to do so (‘sweating the details’) and the reasons themselves both count; and (4) employees are involved in layoff decisions. This latter has two benefits. The employees may create workable alternatives to layoffs and they judge layoffs as more justified when they are involved in decisions.