People make all sorts of judgements of their life experiences. Some include perceptions of fairness, often about negative events. One such event is organisational downsizing, personally experienced or observed. / Downsizing includes retrenchment, redundancy and redeployment. Its use has become a widespread practice in workplace change. Research into downsizing and fairness has shown that judgements of distributive, procedural and interactional fairness have significant effects on individuals and on the productivity of organisations. Most research into these matters originates in the United States private sector, and is predominantly positivist. Interpretive approaches may give a wider perspective on people's judgements. This study complements and extends the findings of the earlier positivist research. / Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 44 private and public sector individuals. Some of them had themselves been retrenched, made redundant or redeployed; others included their colleagues, managers and union officials. Interviewees were drawn from a bank and a supermarket in the private sector and a government business enterprise (GBE) and 6 government departments in the private sector. There were 25 public sector interviewees who participated with 18 from departments and seven from the GBE. / The results of the interviews give evidence about the importance of several different factors in people's judgements of their downsizing experiences and particularly suggest that a comprehensive management approach that addresses employees' whole of experience fairness judgements is more likely to achieve results that are beneficial to the organisation and the people involved in the downsizing, compared to approaches that refer to stereotyped processes or preconceived principles. The results can also inform employees and their representatives about what might be reasonable expectations of fair treatment at times of organisational change, and can inform policies relating to human resource management standards across government and major corporations. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2006.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267141 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Baker, David |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright David Baker 2006 |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds