ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the role of role stress and ethical conflict as perceived by those who are responsible for the operational execution of a downsizing event, and provides the ongoing debate on the impact of down-sizing on organizations and their members. It introduces a scenario-based scale that allows future research to capture the main ethical aspects of a downsizing event. The chapter presents the findings by quantitatively testing how expressed ethical conflict of both types of executioners being internally or externally associated affects role stress, leading to new directions for further research about the effects of work-force downsizing. Despite the popularity of downsizing as a managerial initiative to pursue strategic goals, prior research on downsizing has not yet succeeded in showing consistent results that downsizing indeed yields these intended outcomes. The relationship between prior experience of the executioner and their perceived levels of role stress has been studied in recent downsizing literature about downsizing executioners.