Resizing The Organization 14 pot

Wiley 1996 reviewed pre-viously published empirical studies that examined the relationship between how employees describe their work environment and the relative performance of those wor

Another model of organizational performance that has re-ceived significant attention in recent years is the Balanced Score-card (Kaplan & Norton, 1996a, 1996b), a method for translating management strategy into action It produces a measurement sys-tem that reflects a management team’s hypotheses and beliefs about how a set of interrelated variables interacts over time to pro-duce business success Within this framework, certain variables are leading indicators that predict success; others are lagging indica-tors that indicate actual performance levels after the performance has occurred The balanced scorecard contains four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth (see Figure 6.2)

The financial objectives serve as the focus for the objectives and measures on all other scorecard perspectives The idea is that every measure selected for the balanced scorecard should be part

of a link of cause-and-effect relationships, culminating in improved financial performance The customer perspective enables a com-pany to identify and measure the value proposition it will deliver

to targeted customers and market segments The internal business perspective identifies the processes that are most critical to achiev-ing the objectives from the customer and shareholder perspectives Fundamentally, the learning and growth perspective is posited as the enabler of achieving ambitious objectives in the other three perspectives In other words, this perspective is viewed as contain-ing the drivers of the outcomes for the other perspectives

While the Service-Profit Chain and Balanced Scorecard Mod-els are derived from a series of intensive case studies, another holis-tic model of organizational performance emerged primarily on the basis of larger-scale quantitative studies Wiley (1996) reviewed pre-viously published empirical studies that examined the relationship between how employees describe their work environment and the relative performance of those work environments from both cus-tomer and financial perspectives Wiley summarized this research and captured the main findings in the High Performance Model (previously referred to as the Linkage Research Model; see Figure 6.3) This model provides a comprehensive framework for inte-grating all previously published linkage research It suggests that the more present and visible certain organizational and leadership

D OWNSIZING AND E MPLOYEE F ULFILLMENT AND O RGANIZATIONAL C APABILITY 111

Team-Fly®

practices are in a work environment, the more energized and pro-ductive the workforce is In turn, the more energized and productive the workforce is, the greater are the satisfaction of cus-tomers and the stronger the long-term business performance of the organization

The model is built around the following conclusions drawn from a summary of linkage research studies:

Figure 6.2 Balanced Scorecard Framework for

Translating Strategy into Operational Terms.

Initiatives

Targets Measures Objectives

Vision and Strategy

To satisfy our shareholders and customers, what business processes must we excel at?

Internal Business Process

TargetsInitiatives Measures Objectives

To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?

Learning and Growth

Initiatives

Targets Measures Objectives

To succeed financially, how should

we appear

to our shareholders?

Financial

Initiatives

Targets Measures Objectives

To achieve

our vision,

how should

we appear

to our

customers?

Customer

Source: Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review From Robert S.

Kaplan and David P Norton, “Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic

Management System.” Harvard Business Review, January-February 1996: 76.

Copyright © 1996 by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, all rights reserved.

• Employee and customer satisfaction are strongly and positively linked

• A leadership value system, easily observed by employees and emphasizing customer service and product quality, is funda-mental to this linkage

• Specific practices that the organization and its managers de-rive from this value system include providing employees with the support, resources, and training required to perform their jobs effectively; involving them in decisions that affect their work; and empowering them to do what is necessary to meet customer objectives and expectations

• Employee retention is positively related to customers’ satisfac-tion with the quality of service they received

Figure 6.3 The High Performance Model.

Customer Results

• Responsive service

• Product quality

• Overall satisfaction

• Customer retention

Employee Results

• Information/knowledge

• Teamwork/cooperation

• Overall satisfaction

• Employee retention

Business Performance

• Sales growth

• Market share

• Productivity

• Long-term profitability

Leadership Practices

• Customer orientation

• Quality emphasis

• Employee training

• Involvement/empowerment

Work Characteristics

Elapsed

Time

Source: Wiley (1996) © Gantz Wiley Research.

• Quality and customer satisfaction have long-term positive relationships with customer retention, market share, and profitability

• Certain practices that increase short-term sales and profits may

do so at the expense of employee and customer satisfaction

• Investment in practices that support quality and employee and customer satisfaction is a long-term business strategy, not a quick-fix solution

• As the leadership value system over time continues to be re-garded as the foundation for achieving higher customer satis-faction and stronger business performance, it becomes

self-reinforcing

Wiley and Brooks (2000) provided a subsequent review of the linkage research literature that added support for the original model In their review, they also provided three new case studies and, blending those results with the previous research, developed

a taxonomy of the characteristics of the high-performance organi-zation This taxonomy describes in greater clarity and detail, based

on descriptions provided by employees, how high-performing units differ from low-performing units

These new models of organization performance share a com-mon framework that explicitly acknowledges the interrelationship between management strategy and leadership practices, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and the financial consequences for a business firm There are several reasons why and how this

is relevant to a discussion of corporate downsizing, all of which are inherent in these complementary models of organizational performance:

• Downsizing is a tool focused on improving financial perfor-mance (generally short term; Cascio, 1998)

• Employee opinions of the work environment are leading indi-cators of customer satisfaction and long-term business perfor-mance (Wiley, 1996)

• Downsizing has a negative impact on how favorably employees characterize their work environment and increases their inten-tion to resign voluntarily (De Meuse & Tornow, 1990)

The remainder of this chapter documents the impact of layoffs

on key employee opinions This research draws on an ongoing multi-decade program of research tracking employee opinions across the United States

The WorkTrends Database

To examine the impact of layoffs on key employee opinions, we an-alyzed selected subsets of the WorkTrends survey database Work-Trends is an ongoing survey program conducted annually by Gantz Wiley Research of Minneapolis, a customer and employee survey research consulting firm The database was created and is main-tained to allow clients of Gantz Wiley Research to compare results

of employee surveys conducted within their organizations to a rep-resentative and valid external database

Each year of WorkTrends data is gathered by a survey measur-ing worker opinions on a broad variety of workplace topics Sub-jects participating in the survey are drawn from a random sample

of adult workers in the United States The sample is stratified ac-cording to key U.S census demographics, including age, income, and geography Surveys are administered in paper-and-pencil form and completed by the principal wage earners of a household, with the requirement that the respondents are full-time employees of organizations employing one hundred or more employees The WorkTrends database has been used previously as the source of in-formation about worker opinions in the United States The most

recent publication drawing on WorkTrends is The Changing Nature

of Work (National Research Council, 1999), which examines

macrolevel trends in the U.S economy and uses WorkTrends to complement economic, sociological, and demographic data The subsets of the WorkTrends database analyzed for the pur-poses of this chapter are the years 1990, 1994, 1996, and 2000 In each of these years, 10,000 surveys were administered The num-ber of respondents in 1990, 1994, 1996, and 2000 were, respec-tively, 4,055, 5,887, 6,203, and 5,630, representing response rates

of, respectively, 41 percent, 59 percent, 62 percent, and 56 percent

In addition to being asked to express their opinions on a broad variety of workplace topics, respondents to the WorkTrends survey

are asked to provide a yes or no answer to the question: “My orga-nization has laid off employees in the last 12 months due to a downturn in business.” For the four years under consideration, the percentage of employees who reported working in an organization that had downsized were 34 percent (1990), 36 percent (1994), 35 percent (1996), and 21 percent (2000) (see Table 6.1) It is inter-esting to note that in the early and mid-1990s, the percentage of organizations laying off employees was relatively stable In the year

2000, at the height of the economic cycle in the United States, lay-off activity was, according to WorkTrends data, at a fifteen-year low This would correspond to broad-scale economic data reflecting that the unemployment rate also was at its lowest point in decades

Table 6.1 Employees Reporting Recent

Layoffs by Industry, 1990–2000.

Heavy manufacturing 59% 48% 48% 39% 48% Electronics and

computer manufacturing 50 54 52 34 48

Retail/wholesale trade 33 29 29 18 27 Health care services

Government/public

Communication

Transportation

Banking and other

Source: Gantz Wiley Research, WorkTrends survey program.

Table 6.1 provides the percentage of downsizing activity by major industry type Employees who report the highest levels of downsizing activity tend to work in manufacturing industries (heavy, electronic and computer, light) Employees who report the lowest levels of downsizing activity tend to work in government/ public administration and education

Impact of Downsizing on Employee Fulfillment

Since well before the advent of Fortune magazine’s “Best Places to

Work” rankings, many organizations have made it a goal to be a ful-filling place to work Each organization might have its own definition

of what this means—from employer of choice or engagement to more traditional and understood constructs of job satisfaction or commit-ment However defined, it is widely acknowledged that layoffs can have a profound impact on an employee’s quality of work life This chapter describes one approach to defining fulfillment and delin-eates how downsizing affects organizations’ efforts to promote it For this research, our definition of employee fulfillment is con-sistent with traditional concepts of psychological contracts, as well

as popular notions of employer of choice Specifically, an employee

is fulfilled when, in return for work performed, he or she receives sufficient value back from the organization To answer the ques-tion of what employees value, the annual surveys described in the previous section have frequently included the open-ended ques-tion, “As an employee, what is the one thing you want most from the organization for which you work?” Written comments are tran-scribed and rigorously coded according to the methods detran-scribed

by Hause, Wiley, and Lunsford (1997)

From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, the responses from ap-proximately 70 percent of over 30,000 employees responding to this question can be sorted into five categories: (1) fair compen-sation (including pay and benefits), (2) psychological recognition, (3) career development, (4) job security and stability, and (5) in-teresting work (Hause & Wiley, 1996) Analyses performed by Hause and Wiley, as well as those performed subsequently on later survey iterations, demonstrate that these issues are remarkably sta-ble across industry, organization size, job type, gender, and other organizational and personal demographics

Based on this program of research, quantitative scales have been developed to measure each of these topics Table 6.2 provides sample items for each of these scales, plus a range of Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients for the multiple years of survey itera-tions included in this research

Negative relationships between downsizing and employee re-lations (De Meuse et al., 1997) have been established The current analyses add an examination of the following core questions:

Table 6.2 Employee Fulfillment Scales.

Number 2000 Scale of Items Alpha Sample Items

Career Development 3 82 How satisfied are you with

your opportunity to get a better job in your company? How satisfied are you with the opportunity for career development at your company?

Recognition 3 84 My performance on the job is

evaluated fairly

How satisfied are you with the recognition you get for the work you do?

Fair Compensation 4 83 How do you rate the amount

of pay you get on your job? How do you rate your total benefits program?

Security/Stability 2 N.A.a How do you rate your

company in providing job security for people like yourself?

I have confidence in the future of my company Interesting Work 4 87 I like the kind of work I do

aFor this two-item scale, the correlation is 57, p < 001.

• To what extent is there an impact of layoffs on the fulfillment

of employees surviving within the organization?

• What elements of employee fulfillment, again for employees surviving layoffs, are most affected by downsizing?

• How stable are these relationships over time?

In essence, analyses compared the employee fulfillment scales listed in Table 6.2 across layoff and nonlayoff samples Although the content of the annual surveys changes somewhat from year to year, these five scales are completely intact for the years used in these analyses: 1990, 1994, 1996, and 2000

Table 6.3 presents the means of all five scales for each of the years included for the overall sample, as well as by layoff and non-layoff samples Given the large sample sizes, all differences are

sig-nificant at the p≤.001 level Thus, the eta statistic is provided as a measure of association (interpreted in this case similarly to a cor-relation) Several conclusions are apparent

Employees within organizations recently experiencing layoffs feel significantly less fulfilled All findings are remarkably consis-tent across time Clearly, a sense of security and confidence in the future of the organization is the issue most affected by layoffs This reflects that the major concern of employees during this time of organizational stress has to do with the uncertainty of both whether they will have jobs in the future and whether the organization will emerge from the business context prompting layoffs in the first place Although previous research has demonstrated that percep-tions of security and stability are important to layoff survivors (Arm-strong-Stassen, 1994; Brockner, Grover, Reed, & Dewitt, 1992), these data indicate that they are the most important factor Although the size of the impact is notably less, the category demonstrating the second strongest impact of layoffs is career de-velopment While career growth within a company clearly is sec-ondary to ensuring one still has a job, an employee’s sense of longer-term development opportunities is disrupted by layoff activity Armstrong-Stassen (1994), Brockner, Grover, and Mauritz (1988), and others have found that supervisor recognition can help to increase organizational commitment and retention among layoff survivors In addition, Brockner et al (1992) found that lay-off survivors whose jobs became more interesting (based on a self-report) increased their work effort over employees whose jobs did

Table 6.3 Employee Fulfillment

by Layoff Activity, 1990–2000.

F -value 97.63 172.76 144.70 82.53

F -value 40.80 81.94 102.60 52.38

F -value 30.32 21.06 23.76 58.89

F -value 588.48 690.79 674.93 551.90

F -value 39.60 64.02 63.12 59.52

Note: Means are based on five-point scales (agreement, satisfaction, or

good-poor) Higher means reflect more favorable responses Sample sizes range from 4,236 to 6,876.