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Yehuda Baruch: University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK and
Patricia Hind: Ashridge Management College, Berkhamsted, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This paper is a development of a study first presented in the Eighth European Congress of Work and Organizational Psychology, Verona, April 1997.
The management of organizations today is dominated by the experience and consequences of change. Changes, be they business re-engineering processes, restructuring, flattening, etc., bring innovation but also chaos and uncertainty to the management of people in the workplace. Many such changes have involved the reduction of employee numbers and a limitation in career opportunities. Not long ago a desired image, for many firms, was to be seen to offer a secure place to work. Now, the whole concept of a lifelong career in a company, or even an industry, has become exceptional rather than expected. Beyond merely downsizing, it is entirely plausible that over the course of an individual's work life a given firm may cease to exist (at least independently), and any given industry may shrink through a process of cutbacks and mergers (Herriot and Pemberton, 1995; VanHuss, 1995; Peiperl and Baruch, 1997).
It is becoming increasingly well documented that employees who remain within an organization after significant downsizing or delayering often experience the adverse effects of change as profoundly as those who have left (Brockner, 1992; Astrachan, 1995). It has been acknowledged that "survivors" may become demotivated, cynical, insecure and demoralised. This might be due to stress and anxiety, based on fear of further "downsizing/restructuring", or due to diminishing trust between employees and management, or indeed a combination of these factors. Such emotional consequences are likely to have performance related counterparts which this study is designed to investigate and identify. Businesses which understand these attitudinal and motivational issues will be able to enhance the performance of these survivors, and thus of the organization (Doherty and Horsted, 1995). The implications of this concept for businesses which have, over the past decade, experienced unprecedented deregulation, fierce competition, advanced technology and a recession are challenging.
The term "survivor syndrome" has been coined to describe the set of shared reactions and behaviours of people who have survived an adverse event. Being used with reference to situations such as the surviving of the Holocaust, the term was borrowed...