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This study seeks to examine the impact of downsizing and restructuring decisions and processes on perceptions of organisational knowledge and effectiveness after downsizing and restructuring events in “successful” and “unsuccessful” organisations.

The study proposes a conceptual framework hypothesising that the impact of decisions and processes on levels of organisational knowledge are key determinants of effectiveness in post‐downsizing and restructuring organisations. Data were collected using a survey instrument developed through review of literature along with focus group findings. Survey data are factor‐analysed to identify stable constructs for testing hypotheses using regression analysis.

The findings indicate that the significance of the variables tested is found in those organisations considered by employees to be unsuccessful after downsizing and restructuring, rather than in their successful counterparts

The findings indicate that organisations undertaking downsizing or restructuring need to consider the organisational culture and climate with regard to knowledge retention and the potential impact of these initiatives to ensure that employee experiences are constructive. Support strategies such as counselling and training are important, as are job redesign, time for employee handover and documentation of procedures, if knowledge retention is to be maximised.

Although knowledge retention within organisations is generally accepted as desirable, little previous research has considered the impact of downsizing decisions or processes on knowledge retention. Additionally, data collected for this research were drawn from multiple respondents within a large number of organisations, providing breadth and depth of data for analysis.

Increased competition and resource scarcity have caused hospitals to seek internal efficiencies by restructuring their structures and processes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of an organization's orientation toward control and learning and the use of process facilitators on perceived organizational consensus on outcomes related to cost, quality, and the ability to sustain implemented changes following a major hospital restructuring.

Data from 263 hospitals from across the USA were collected. Factor analysis was employed to develop scales measuring the organization's emphasis on learning, controls, and processes. Regression analysis then examined their relationship to the consensus on restructured outcomes.

The findings suggest a positive relationship between a learning orientation and processes with improved perceived agreement on restructuring outcomes. Hospitals with control orientations have a negative relationship with perceived organizational consensus.

The research has some limitations. The primary data for both the CEOs' and employees' perspectives comes from hospital CEOs. Also, the study is a cross‐sectional study and lacks longitudinal information. It also includes mostly not‐for‐profit hospitals, with 100 or more beds, in urban areas.

Hospitals will continue to feel pressures for the need to restructure and change. The findings suggest that hospitals achieve better results if they foster a learning orientation and put in place processes to facilitate the challenges of change. Although control systems are important, executives should realize that they might impede organizational efforts during organizational change. Hospitals may succeed in their change efforts by balancing adequate control and learning that are supported by processes to facilitate restructuring efforts.

The work provides an original study on the effects of an organization's orientation of learning and controls and change processes on the perceived consensus of restructuring outcomes. The dichotomy of learning and controls has not been applied to hospital consensus on outcomes. The research suggests that hospitals can improve their change efforts by implementing appropriate processes and greater learning mechanisms. During times of stress and change hospitals often become more control oriented, which may create greater misalignments and ineffective change. Managers should learn from the research that appropriate processes and learning will provide better consensus and more effective change.

This study seeks to examine the association of employee's evaluation of organizational restructuring with the destruction of old social capital, development of new social capital, and the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS).

Data were used from 419 teachers of Dutch secondary schools using hierarchical regression analyses.

Results show that more positive employees' evaluation of the organizational restructuring are less likely to remain relying on old social capital resources, and score higher on development of new social capital. Moreover, POS mediated the association of employee's evaluation of the organizational restructuring with old and new social capital.

Future research, utilizing longitudinal designs and experiments that better lend it to causal inferences, are needed to examine relationships between organizational restructuring, POS, and social capital.

The results of this study provide a first step toward outlining the importance of organizational restructuring for social capital theory and how employees cope with transition to different work units. In organizations, having a shared language and narratives may allow team members to more easily integrate knowledge and provide better support to one another. Moreover, a common perspective and understanding among team members may allow employees members to anticipate the behavior of other members, thus promoting organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Organizational scholars are intrigued about stakeholders who propose multiple and conflicting ideas about what is good for their organization. Such contradictions are called paradoxical tensions. Although researchers have singled these out for analysis, focusing only on individual tensions prevents scrutiny of multiple paradoxical tensions that simultaneously emerge and how effectively organizations can manage them. In complex environments – especially during an organizational restructuring – multiple and interrelated tensions occur. Therefore, the objective in this paper is to investigate how organizations create multiple paradoxical tensions and how the combined effect of such tensions can constrain organizations during restructuring. The authors thus aim to help managers think reflectively and to plan interventions to deal with issues arising from restructuring through the lens of paradox theory.

The authors adopted purposive sampling for an archival research-based case study of a major restructuring of a leading IT firm in India in the decade 2009–2019. This study focused on the types of paradoxes created and the response of the organization to these during the restructure. The authors identified key events using public documents and news reports from that decade. They drew on two sources of data: mainstream media coverage and third-party documents about the company. The latter included monographs and academic publications written by critics, business historians and design and management scholars.

The findings address the gaps in the literature about how reorganizing during a restructure shapes the contradictions that lead to tensions and coexisting conflicting dualities, creating paradoxes. This study provides the reader with deeper insights into belonging, organizing, learning and performing tensions – core to paradox theory – along with their short- and long-term implications for organizational restructuring. The study demonstrates organizational responses to paradox and its practical implications for managers. The paradoxical nature of cultural–structural tensions in Indian organizations continues to be researched but, by focusing on paradox theory, the authors have opened doors for future research.

Although there is no dispute that effective management of tensions can facilitate organizational performance, contradictory demands that lead to tensions have only intensified as organizational environments become more global, dynamic and competitive. Paradox theory is thus valuable for understanding tensions between equally valid principles, inferences and insights. Although this paper is based on a case study, the framework proposed here can form the basis for theoretical generalizability within certain limitations. Because organizations face similar paradoxical situations under competing demands during restructuring and because paradoxes are becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations, the authors expect their propositions to apply in other cases of restructuring. However, the authors would like to caution that the model developed here should be tested and refined in other contexts to more fully establish its validity and generalizability.

This paper aims to study the impact of psychological contract breach and employee stress on job outcomes such as job involvement and organizational citizenship behaviour in the Indian banking sector, with special reference to State Bank of India.

A questionnaire survey was administered. Data was collected from employees of a bank, which has undergone a merger. Validity tests were carried out to confirm the accuracy of the measurement variables. Regression analysis was used to test the stated hypotheses. A paired t-test was used to compare the level of job outcomes experienced by the employees before and after the merger.

The study has shown that psychological contract breach has an impact on job stress. Results also show that the merger has made a positive impact on the employees. Job involvement and engagement were found to be improved after the merger. Employees were also found to be more committed to the organization and exhibit high organizational citizenship behaviour.

The organizational restructuring has been long thought to play a crucial role in affecting the job outcomes of employees. This study reconfirms those concepts and provides implications for researchers and managers.

This study makes a significant theoretical contribution to the literature as this is one of the very few studies to deal with the impact of organizational restructuring on employee stress and job outcomes in the Indian Scenario.

Despite the growing amount of literature on women′s career life histories and individual career paths, analysis of the different and changing organizational contexts in which women pursue their careers is sparse. Uses an in‐depth case study of Public Sector Utility to examine how the restructuring of a public sector bureaucracy over a five‐year period affected the careers of women managers. Finds that although restructuring at PSU has opened up opportunities for women through an increase in the number of managerial jobs and through changes in the objective requirements of managerial work, a number of factors operated to keep glass ceilings in place: the concentration of women in the “velvet ghetto” of human resources, or their isolation in the cul‐de‐sac of other professional specialisms; the increased significance of informal organizational processes and networks as a means to career progress in a time of uncertainty; poor line manager support for access to work‐related career development opportunities such as special development projects and task force memberships; and generic corporate‐wide equal opportunity policies and processes which emphasize formal procedure and practice, and which have become marginal to core business concerns and the rest of human resource policy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of a job resources-based intervention aimed at proactively increasing work engagement and team innovativeness during organizational restructuring using a person-centered approach.

The intervention was conducted in two organizations: two departments served as participants (n=82) and two as controls (n=52). The aim was to first identify sub-groups of employees with different developmental patterns of work engagement, and then to determine whether these sub-groups benefited differently from the intervention with respect to team innovativeness and work engagement.

Latent profile analysis identified three different patterns of work engagement among the participants: high and stable (n=64), moderate and decreasing (n=13), and low and decreasing (n=5). The χ²-test yielded no significant difference between participants and controls (n=52) with respect to team innovativeness over time. However, t-tests showed that team innovativeness increased in the high work engagement class and somewhat decreased in the moderate and low work engagement classes.

During organizational changes, those initially work-engaged seem to be able to proactively build their team innovativeness via a job resources-based intervention and remain engaged; whereas those initially not work-engaged may not, and their work engagement may even decrease.

This study reveals that an initial level of work engagement is a prerequisite why some employees profit more from a job resources-based intervention than others and provides tailored knowledge on the effectiveness of the intervention.

Examines varied empirical studies on downsizing which have revealed that, as a result of its aftermath, high percentages of companies have judged these efforts as unsuccessful. Corporate restructuring encompasses multiple forms of change, which are classified into three distinct categories: portfolio, financial and organizational. An analysis of the Freeman and Cameron theoretical framework on downsizing implementation processes is examined in terms of where the process occurs, during periods either of convergence and/or of reorientation, and the results associated with each approach. A case study of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment revealed that restructuring did not provide visible improvements in efficiency, economy and responsiveness. Cultural impact of this intervention revealed negative intergroup reactions, i.e. denial, dissatisfaction. An analysis of Richard Johnson’s model of the antecedents, processes and outcomes of downsizing revealed the impact upon strategy, productivity, human resources and finance. Interrelationships suggested diminished performances of firms which downsized without a lucid blueprint, adversely impacting upon these businesses. Finally, 30 recommendations are given for the human resource executive for effective downsizing, focusing upon: approach, involvement, leadership, communication, preparation, support, cost cutting, measurement, and implementation.

Emphasis is placed on knowledge-sharing practices and their influence on the power structure influenced by the technological background of the organization. This paper aims to focus on technological skills institutionalized to build organizational technological capital favoring the knowledge-sharing practices. It aims to extend the sociology literature by providing a conceptual background to explain the restructuring initiatives through the stabilizing role of technological capital.

Two comparative case studies have been conducted: the first study took place in a public company and the second study was carried out in a private company of telecommunication involving a documentary study, an observation and semi-structured interviews.

The findings in this paper show that the knowledge-sharing practices in the organizational field are stabilized by the technological capital. The technological capital promotes a knowledge management system and plays an important role in restructuring the established power within knowledge intensive organizations.

Chief executive officers are encouraged to promote sharing practices through developing an innovation culture and valuing technological skills. Relevance should be granted to the technological capital, which aligns the restructuring of a learning organization and promotes the knowledge management systems and stabilizes the organizational structure. Organizations should capitalize a set of technological skills as part of their organizational relevant capital.

Based on the practice theory of Bourdieu, this paper lights on the triad relation between knowledge sharing/organizational structure/technological capital through comparing between public/private management modes. A theoretical framework is proposed to overlap the ambiguity of the relation between knowledge and power.

The paper is based on a five year, UMIST‐Institute of Management study into the changing nature of the quality of working life and seeks to uncover differences in the incidence and impact of organizational change on the perceptions and experiences of managers in the public sector, the private sector and the (former public) utilities. The research indicates that there are significant differences in the impact of organizational change on managers in the three sectors with public sector managers and managers from the utilities having been more adversely affected. An analysis of managers’ perceptions of their “organization as a place to work”, prevailing managerial styles in their organization and managers’ perceptions of the “changing nature of their job” also reveals wide differences between managers in the three different sectors.