All organizational change comes with a lot of fear and insecurity, for managers as well as employees.
Legend: Recommendation of our expert
Expert advisor:
- Michel PÉRUSSE, associate professor, Université de Sherbrooke
Authors:
- Étienne FOUQUET, research assistant, Université de Sherbrooke
Rachèle HÉBERT, research professional, Université de Sherbrooke
Rébecca LEFEBVRE, research professional, Université de Sherbrooke
This initiative was made possible through a collaboration with the Université de Sherbrooke.
Although a number of studies have been done on the topic of change in recent years, its impact on employee insecurity has not received a lot of attention. How to manage this insecurity and reduce negative consequences on the organization? To answer this question, we interpreted the study of Abildgaard, Nielsen and Sverke, published in 2017. This study aimed to evaluate the effects on job insecurity of participatory intervention at the organizational level during a restructuring.
What do we mean by :
Restructuring
Larousse dictionary defines restructuring as the act of reorganizing something based on new principles, with new structures. A restructuring always involves change, but not always at the same levels. So although this study deals with a restructuring that involves job cuts, another organization might reorganize departments, without cutting any jobs. It is therefore important to interpret the results of this study according to your own organizational context.
Intervention at the organizational level
The authors define organizational intervention as a series of planned actions, behaviours (stress management techniques) and theories (education on organizational health) that aims to improve employee health and well-being by changing the way work is designed, organized and managed.
Job insecurity
The authors highlight two types of job insecurity
- Qualitative job insecurity: uncertainty about the future, concerning the future job content.
- Quantitative job insecurity: the risk of losing your job.
Both types of job insecurity can have negative consequences on employees, such as reduced well-being, weak engagement in the organization and higher levels of depressive symptoms.
Method
- Two Danish postal services, which were different and independent from each other from an organizational point of view.
- 238 participants.
- By random draw, one of the two organizations played the role of intervention group (group where participatory intervention was put in place), and the other, the role of control group (where no intervention was put in place).
- both postal services carried out very similar tasks.
- Mixed-method approach combining interviews, observations in the field and questionnaires to evaluate participatory intervention at the organizational level.
Participatory intervention
Participatory intervention means that employees are involved in the implementation of organizational change. In other words, they are invited to participate in planning it and making it happen. This is the case, for example, whenemployees and managers contribute to prioritizing the problems that need to be solved most urgently. As part of the study analyzed, the intervention targeted the restructuring of two postal services. The postal services started to employ many fewer postal workers and to depend less on mail delivery as the primary source of revenue, focusing instead on other services, such as the delivery of packages. Thus, job cuts were expected, as well as changes in how tasks were organized. The restructuring took place in two stages. The first stage consisted of two phases and applied to both postal services.
- Initiation phase
- Exploration phase
The second stage applied to the intervention group only and was divided into four phases:
- Prioritization phase
- Planning phase:
- Implementation phase
- Evaluation phase
What do the results of the study tell us?
Surprisingly… Employee participation in the change process is beneficial in a very specific way!
Employee participation in developing content for the organizational intervention did not cause a reduction of job insecurity. In fact, both types of insecurity increased slightly. However, when it came to qualitative insecurity – which was the subject of the specific action plans – this increase was significantly less than in the control group (no intervention).
Principal results
- Paradox of participatory intervention
- It is paradoxical to introduce measures that aim to reduce job insecurity when change has been planned and announced.
- Participatory interventionadds a number of tasks to employees’ workload.
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