The Effects of Organizational Downsizing And Layoffs on Organizational Commitment: A Field Research

Responding to today’s quickly changing environments is prevalent these present days, with quality performance depending on a firm’s appropriate size rather than extended size. Researchers’ and practitioners’ views related to firm size began to change in the early 1990s. As a result, some new concepts and initiatives, such as organizational downsizing, began to take place in the field of management and organizations. Organizational downsizing, which is defined as reducing an organization’s use of human and capital resources to correct misalignment and improve performance (DeWitt, 1993), offers many benefits, from increased productivity to creating synergy. Exploiting these benefits depends on “the survivors” attitudes and behaviors. Organizational commitment is one of the attitudes that is affected by organizational downsizing. In this paper, we examined how organizational downsizing affected survivors’ commitment to the organization. A survey was conducted using five firms in the manufacturing industry in Kayseri (Turkey) that were undergoing downsizing.  Data were obtained from 163 employees and was analyzed using SPSS 15.0. The survey revealed that employees’ positive perceptions of organizational downsizing increased organizational commitment, including affective, continuance, and normative commitment.