Corporate Downsizing and Organizational Behaviour: The Case of Benson Idahosa University Benin-City, Nigeria.

Abstract

The research problem that informed the prosecution of this study relates to the impact of corporate downsizing on the behaviour of the survivor employees of the corporate organizations using the Benson Idahosa University in Benin-City, Nigeria as the case study. The university laid off more than 100 employees including academic and non-academic staff on Monday 20^th May, 2013. This case is just one instance of the tendency of Nigerian organizations to retrench their workforce at the least symptom of financial distress instead of exploring other survival strategies that are less traumatic on the human resources. To operationalize the study a 20-point structured Questionnaire complemented with an open-ended interview schedule was constructed to generate primary data from 100 stratified and systematically selected samples of the surviving employees. The responses were subjected to both descriptive and inferential analyses using frequency distribution/percentages and the Chi-Square Statistic. The latter was used to test the four hypotheses formulated for the study. The tests were significant at the 0.05 level of significance (95% confidence level). The findings were that corporate downsizing demotivated surviving employees and impacted negatively employee commitment, job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviour of surviving employees. The researchers, therefore, recommend the adoption of the Japanese work culture and the theory Z approach as survival strategies instead of corporate downsizing. They believe that this strategy if adopted nationwide will contribute to building capacity for sustainable growth and development of Nigeria using the workforce some of whom have been training at the expense of the organization throwing them overboard.