Psychological Impact Of Downsizing On Survivors

Last year, downsizing had become the strategy favored by many companies attempting to cope with the Financial Crisis. Many researches had suggested that downsizing would lead to survivor syndrome.One of the purposes of this research is to develop the construct of downsizing policies (DP) itself in the context of China and the intervention policies (IP) conducted during downsizing. Another purpose is to examine the relation between different DPs and survivors' Organizational Justice (OJ) and Organizatational Commitment (OC), and the moderating effects of IPs. During this research, I had an exchange opportunity to Hungary, which provided me a great chance to do a competitive study between Chinese and Hungarian survivors. The whole research included four stages: the first stage covered the literature review and the construction of the supposed model. The second stage covered the interviews which were aimed to design the questionnaire of DP and IP. The third stage included a questionnaire survey and consequent statistic analysis. A total of 188 questionnaires were used in the data analysis. The forth stage covered the case study in a company in Hungary.The main conclusions are as following: (1) Various DPs could be arranged into two major categories which were direct downsizing (DD) and indirect downsizing (ID). (2) DP would reduce the OJ of survivors but IP could be used to ease this impact. When IP level was higher, DP would not reduce OJ so dramatically as when IP level was lower. (3) IP would reduce the affective commitment (AC) of survivors and OJ mediated the relation between IP and AC. (4) In the context of Financial Crisis, the continuance commitment (CC) of Chinese survivors was very high and it did not change no matter what kind of DP or IP were implemented. (5) Although Hungary was influenced fiercely, the continuance commitment (CC) of Hungarian survivors was not as high as Chinese survivors'. The reason maybe was that Hungarian government provided complete social security system for whole people.