The New Reality for UK Managers: Perpetual Change and Employment Instability

Abstract

Redundancy, delayering and other forms of organisational change have become increasingly prevalent over the last ten years. Some of the worst-hit industries during the recent years have been the former public utilities, the financial services sector and manufacturing. This paper is based on the results from the first three years' data from a five year UMIST-Institute of Management research programme which has been designed to explore the changing nature of managerial work in the UK and the impact of organisational change on managers' sense of loyalty, morale and motivation. It has been shown in the past (Sahdev and Vinnicombe 1998; Worrall, Cooper and Campbell 1999) that redundancy is seen a particularly damaging form of change on survivors and that redundancy often fails to achieve the objectives on which it was justified, leaving many unintended consequences. This article discusses the effects of organisational change on surviving managers where redundancy has been used, compared with organisations where redundancy has not been used. The results suggest that if redundancy is to be continually pursued as a method of change, managers should be aware of the damaging implications not only to individuals but to the culture of the downsized organisation.