M.A. / Organisational transformation has become a way of life. Transformation may be prompted by forces internal and external to the organisation. Typical organisational transformation involves the restructuring or elimination of jobs. Transformation of any organisation necessarily balances the elimination of outdated systems alongside the preservation of core assets. Change creates pressure in any organisation. This is especially true when the organisation has not had much experience in dealing with it. The first taste of major change in this situation can be traumatic. Organisational transition is slow, expensive and difficult. There is a tendency to believe that change can be instant, painless and quick. The process of making a major change to an organisation's identity requires people to let go of "how it was" and move through a period of doubt and uncertainty. The focus of this study is on describing the attitude of workers towards transformation. A standardised scale was used as a way of measuring the feelings and attitudes of workers towards transformation. The actual result reported from this study indicates that there is a lot of negative feelings and attitudes towards the whole transformation process.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters in Management Sciences: Human Resources Management, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017. / The overall aim of the study was to investigate the impact of job insecurity on job satisfaction and organisational commitment at Femina Garments in Zimbabwe. Job insecurity has increased considerably over the recent decade in the clothing industry of Zimbabwe. Negative economic growth, retrenchments and company closures have led to job insecurity increase in Zimbabwe. Against this background, the literature suggests that job insecurity has a negative impact on different job attitudes. The study was conducted at Femina Garments, a clothing manufacturing company in Zimbabwe. The study adopted the quantitative research design and a survey method was employed for all 109 employees at Femina Garments. A structured closed-ended questionnaire was used to collect data. A significant response rate of 93.58% was obtained using the personal method of data collection. The responses to the questionnaire were captured and analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24.0 for Windows. Several hypotheses were formulated and tested using the Pearson`s chi-square and Spearman`s rank order correlation co-efficient. The main findings revealed that job insecurity did have an impact on organisational commitment. The findings also revealed that job insecurity had no relationship with job satisfaction at Femina Garments. The recommendations suggest that management at Femina Garments should provide clear communication, provide social support and maintain a balanced psychological contract. The recommendations also suggest that management at Femina Garments should provide salaries and benefits that are market related. The study concludes by providing directions for future research. / M

The restrictions imposed by CO2 emission standards in Europe and many countries have promoted the development of more efficient spark ignition engines. The reduced swept volume and number of cylinders of four-stroke engines has significantly improved fuel economy by means of lower pumping and friction losses. This approach, known as engine downsizing, has demonstrated its potential of reducing fuel consumption on its own as well as applied to hybrid vehicles where a low weight engine is desired. However, aggressive engine downsizing is currently constrained by thermal and mechanical stresses and knocking combustion. In order to overcome these limitations, the present work evaluates the application of a conventional poppet valve direct injection engine into the two-stroke cycle. Two-stroke engines have the ability to produce higher power with reduced swept volume and less weight than four-stroke engines thanks to the doubled firing frequency. These advantages, although, are sometimes offset by poorer emissions resulted from fuel short-circuiting; lower thermal efficiency resulted from short expansion process; and reduced engine durability due to lubrication issues. Therefore, in this research the four-stroke engine architecture was employed so these shortcomings could be addressed by the use of direct fuel injection, variable valve actuation and a wet crankcase, respectively. The burnt gases were scavenged during a long valve overlap by means of boosted air supplied by an external compressor. An electrohydraulic fully-variable valve train enabled the optimisation of the gas exchange process in a variety of engine operating conditions. The air-fuel mixture formation was evaluated through computational fluid dynamic simulations and correlated to experimental tests. In addition, the engine operation with ethanol was assessed in a wide range of engine loads and speeds. Finally, the engine performance, combustion process, air-fuel mixing and gas exchange results were presented, discussed and contextualised with current four-stroke engines. Keywords: Two-stroke poppet valve engine; gasoline and ethanol direct injection; engine downsizing; supercharged two-stroke cycle.

Magister Artium - MA / Downsizing is one of the most common organisational reactions to organisational change. The effects of global competition, mergers, and the privatisation of public sector companies, among others, are forcing organisations in South Africa to resort to workforce reduction. The purpose of the present study was to address the lack of research on the impact of downsizing on survivors. Specifically, the study examined the interactive effects of job insecurity, locus of control and sense of coherence on the organisational commitment of survivors. / South Africa

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / Until recently South Africa experienced an economic decline, however, despite the current positive trends, many large corporations are compelled to reduce personnel costs. Retrenchments have therefore become an increasingly common occurrence within South Africa. This has had an impact on the level of organisational commitment, absenteeism and turnover. Studies support the link between the levels of organisational commitment of employees, absenteeism and subsequently labour turnover. There is a relative lack of research in South African organisations into the influence of retrenchments on employees within call centre environments that have undergone retrenchments. The aims of this study was therefore to identify the levels of organisational commitment amongst call centre employees who survived a retrenchment that occurred in 2001. / South Africa

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Organisations of every industry are changing continuously. A pervasive response to this experience is some form of downsizing. Chew and Horwitz (2002) state due to globalisation, organisations have increasingly adopted cost/ competitive measures to increase performance. Organisations inevitably seek to survive these pressures by downsizing. According to Tzafrir, Mona- Negrin, Havel and Rom Nagy (2006), downsizing is known to be defined as a company trying to increase its competitiveness, efficiency and productivity by decreasing the number of workers in the organisation. Drummond (2000) states that there is extra pressure put onto the remaining workers for productivity after the layoff process. It must be acknowledged that managers should be seen as both an employee and a supervisor. Managers therefore have to implement the change when the process occurs and deals with the reactions of him/herself and that of the subordinates (Wiesenfeld, Brockner, Petzall, Wolf & Bailey, 2001). To gain a competitive advantage, organisations must pay attention to their managers who are responsible for driving organisation’s processes and outcomes. Rana, Garg and Rastogi (2011) state that organisations need to attend to factors that influence managers’ performance and job satisfaction, such as perception of organisational justice. Managers’ perception of organisational justice is imperative, as subordinates mimic the behaviours and attitude of their managers (Wiesenfeld et al., 2001). The aim of this study is to investigate what impact the downsizing process had on the perception of organizational justice of survivor middle managers. The differences between middle managers’ age, gender, year of service or tenure, marital status and education level were taken into account. The study was conducted in different departments of a large Automotive Retail organisation where downsizing has taken place. A biographical questionnaire and a questionnaire designed to measure perceptions of organisational justice after downsizing (Niehoff and Moorman Organisational Justice Questionnaire), was administered to gather the data. The sample of one hundred and forty-four respondents consisted of male and female middle managers. Convenience sampling was utilised to select the sample. Statistical analyses involved both descriptive and inferential statistics. ANOVA and T-Test were the tools that were used to analyse the data. Findings indicates that there was a statistical significant difference in middle managers’ perception of organisational justice based on gender, age, tenure, marital status and education level in the Automotive Industry.

Today organisations all over the world have to cope with the ever-increasing rate of local and global change. Those in developing countries have to cope with the inefficiencies engendered by state-led economic, developmental and political strategies, such as new government regulations. These have had an impact on the management of human resources and are exemplified by an increasing adoption of strategies meant to reduce pressure on costs and margins. An increasing popular management response to these challenges has been to engage in some form of organisational restructuring such as downsizing. Often employees who remain (survivors) after downsizing are not given much attention, yet the achievement of new strategic goals depends on the survivors having positive attitudes, relentless commitment and high motivation. Research indicates that employees who are motivated and committed contribute vastly to the financial-bottom-line of the organisation. Therefore, downsizing organisations should continuously search for ways to increase such qualities among their survivors. The objective of this study was to identify the factors that influence the attitudes, commitment and motivation of survivors in a developing economy with a volatile environment. To achieve this objective, a theoretical survivor quality model was presented. In order to present the model, firstly, a literature survey on the importance of survivor quality in terms of attitudes, commitment, and motivation among survivors was conducted. Secondly, literature survey pertaining to the drivers of survivor quality was done, and thirdly, literature dealing with strategies to deal with survivor quality was surveyed. The theoretical survivor quality model was used to compile the research instrument that determined the attitudinal, commitment and motivational levels of survivors, how the three constructs are related after downsizing, as well as the factors influencing the observed levels. The questionnaire was randomly distributed among survivors in the selected manufacturing organisations in Zimbabwe. The empirical results obtained from the study showed that survivors in a developing economy with a volatile environment had moderate levels of attitudes, commitment ad motivation. Two categories of factors were identified as important in influencing these levels. They were downsizing strategy and demographic factors. The downsizing strategy factors were communication and victim support, while education, age, and number of years employed emerged as the demographic factors. The study further highlighted that older survivors with less education contributed more to the moderate levels of attitude, commitment and motivation observed. The study highlights that these variables must be taken into consideration when implementing downsizing in an economically volatile environment in order to manage survivor quality. A further point emanating from the study is that prior to downsizing, organisations should adopt effective communication strategies throughout the process. The key factors identified as influencing survivor quality in this study were integrated into the survivor quality model which can be used by other organisations in a similar context to manage survivor quality in order to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, iv and competitive advantage after downsizing.

This thesis describes new trends in the automotive industry. It investigates how these trends altered the automotive market and industry and what are the reasons of it. The thesis then ascertains an impact on the new cars business, in which stress is put on new technologies and automotive market development in the world, with emphasis on the Czech Republic within the crisis period. The thesis follows 2 trend groups, namely the trends that already appear for a longer time as well as the quite new trends influencing substantially the automotive market. The first named group deals with the technological innovations as well as for example with the problem concerning car factories model families expanding with the aim to maximize volume of sale; problems of the car new models safety and performance is another topic of this thesis. As another important topic of this group diesel drive phenomenon problems in the European Union can be taken into account as well as additional burden of taxation for cars with higher fuel consumption connected with it. A significant part of the second group comprises financial crisis development and impact on the new cars sale in a given period. In addition to it, it describes quite new trends, e.g. engine capacity decreasing with the use of supercharged engines (downsizing), coming wave of SUV cars and a phenomenon of four-wheel drive cars. In the final part of this diploma paper problems are analyzed and finally hybrid cars development as well.

M.Phil.

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