Research report presented to the Unisa School of Business Leadership / The purpose of the research is an investigation into how employee involvement can be used as a tool towards raising levels of engagement within actively disengaged employees at Ngwane Mills.

Research report presented to the Unisa School of Business Leadership / The purpose of the research is an investigation into how employee involvement can be used as a tool towards raising levels of engagement within actively disengaged employees at Ngwane Mills.

Recently, organization downsizing has become the major means used by corporations to seek survival or better growth. Organization downsizing has some purposes: to reduce the cost of personal, to get better efficiency, to rearrange the deployment of human resource after M&A. Besides those economic purposes, some scholar think corporations do organization downsizing to get legitimacy. Generally speaking, the purpose of organization downsizing is to get better efficiency or the legitimacy. But lots of researches indicate lots of organization downsizing can not achieve expected goals. Although some corporations can achieve the goal of organization downsizing, many corporations can¡¦t achieve expected goals, and there are also some corporations do a lot of organization downsizing but their situations go from bed to worse. Among the researches of why organization downsizing can¡¦t achieve expected goals, many researches indicate that the application of organization downsizing will make huge negative impact to survivors. Some scholars call that impact survivor syndrome. Besides, some scholars investigate the reason of the failure of organization downsizing from the point of informal social network. Because the theory of social capital includes trust, organization involvement, social network and so on, we can more understand the reason of the failure of organization downsizing from the point of social capital. So the purpose of this research is to use the theory of social capital to investigate the impact of organization downsizing and provide some advices to corporations, so that they can do better about organization downsizing. This research uses case study to understand the reason and the process of organization downsizing, and investigates the negative impact of organization downsizing. Survivor syndrome and social capital play important roles in the analysis of the failure of organization downsizing. This research finds that organization downsizing will do huge damage to social capital. If corporation don¡¦t understand the importance and benefit of social network, then the application of organization downsizing will hurt social network and corporations can¡¦t achieve expected goals. Besides, in the analysis of case study this research finds that organization downsizing also hurt trust, involvement, incentives to cooperation and so on, these issues are part of survivor syndrome, but we also can use social capital to explain.

Masters of Commerce / Organizations are operating within a difficult economic environment and in the face of fierce world competition (George & Jones, 1992 cited in Ndlovu & Brijball Parumasur, 2005). To remain competitive globally and for economic reasons, Theron and Dodd (2011) postulate that organizations sporadically have to retrench workers. In order to reduce expenses as well as costs and losses to the organization, they have to restructure and reduce their headcount and the typical form of engaging in the restructuring is by means of downsizing. Makawatsakul and Kleiner (2003) posit that employee morale and loyalty tend to be the first unintended casualties of a downsizing strategy. The repercussions of downsizing is that it jeopardizes employees’ commitment and morale to a large extent (Muthuvuloo 8Rose, 2005) and survivors thus experience lower job and organizational satisfaction (Baruch & Hind, 2000) as this creates insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. Survivors are also often forced to make a sideway or downward move in their job, may experience a drop in pay and status, become stressed by the amount of work left by departing colleagues that they would now need to undertake and worry about the security of their new position in the organization (Chipunza & Berry 2010). In light of the above, the aim of the study was to investigate the organizational commitment of those employees who survived and remained with the retail organization following a downsizing process. For the purpose of this study a quantitative, non probability convenience sampling design was utilized. The sample (N=150) comprised of both males and females from different ethnic groups. A self developed biographical questionnaire and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) were used to gather data. Statistical analyses involved both descriptive and inferential statistics (the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient, Multiple Regression Analysis and Analysis of Variance). The results of the study indicate that employees display below average levels of commitment to the organization. More specifically, a direct, positive relationship was found between normative and affective commitment. Furthermore, a statistically significant relationship was found between affective and continuance commitment. Statistically significant relationships were found between the biographical characteristics namely, tenure, gender and age, and organizational commitment. Limitations of the current study are put forth and recommendations are made with respect to future research and for the organization.

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.

The main purpose of this study was to explore the impact of organisational change on the lived experiences of employees’ well-being. A sample of six employees participated in the study. The requisite data was obtained using semi-structured interviews. The literature review aimed to conceptualise organisational change and its related constructs, to explore employee well-being and its related constructs, and to understand the impact of organisational change on employees’ well-being in organisational contexts. The specific aims of the empirical study were to explore the impact of organisational change on employee well-being, to provide a basic framework that may assist organisations in managing change initiatives directed at enhancing employee well-being, and to formulate recommendations for possible future research on the impact of organisational change on employee well-being. The findings of this study indicated that the impact of organisational change on employees’ well-being is generally negative owing to the uncertainty of moving from the known to the unknown. All employees are impacted by organisational changes. The findings further indicated that the adverse impacts of organisational change may be moderated by communication, participation in the organisational change process and support. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Com (Industrial and Organizational Psychology)