The Changing Nature of Work Implications for Occupational Analysis (1999) / Chapter Skim
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3 Changes in the Organizational Contexts of Work
3 Changes in the Organizational Contexts of Work
Pages 73-104
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From page 73... ...
ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING In this section, we discuss two important developments in the organization of firms. The first is downsizing and its implications for job security and job stability.
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From page 74... ...
In recent years, firms are hiring at the same time that they are laying off: 31 percent of the large, traditional employers surveyed by the American Management Association in 1996 were adding and cutting workers at the same time, and the average firm that had a downsizing in fact was growing by 6 percent. Smaller firms were creating more jobs than they were cutting, whereas large firms with over 10,000 workers were more likely to see actual declines in overall employment.
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From page 75... ...
Many workers were never employed in internal labor markets with prospects of job security. During the course of the 1980s and especially the l990s, a widespread perception developed that the employment relationship had changed in fundamental ways.
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From page 76... ...
It is possible, for example, that the evidence so far of modest change is driven by rather significant changes by large corporations, balanced by stability in the relationship for the majority of the workforce employed under other arrangements. Empirical studies of the employment relationship based on large, random samples of the population and workforce available over a long span of years have focused primarily on two salient features of the employment relationship: job stability and job security.
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From page 77... ...
The estimates reported in the table reflect a relatively consistent picture: first, 4-year retention rates still show essentially no overall change, if anything rising slightly compared with earlier 4-year spans. However, in the 1991-1995 period, job stability declined rather substantially for workers with 9 or more years of tenure, a finding that may reflect the types of stories that have appeared in the media regarding changes in job stability for "career" employees.
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From page 78... ...
78 cn tr o .
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From page 79... ...
However, because these changes appear principally in recent years, it is difficult at this point to know whether there has been a permanent change in job stability. lob Security In contrast to the preceding section, the concept of job security is presented from the perspective of the employee and focuses on involuntary terminations.
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From page 80... ...
Valletta (1996) suggests that reduced quits may reflect increased insecurity, as adverse labor market developments make workers unwilling to cut their ties to their existing employers and try their luck on the market.
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From page 81... ...
Managerial lobs Managerial jobs may well be the ones that have experienced the greatest transformation in their structure in recent years, and their transformation has been the subject of considerable attention from the business press. To understand what has changed, it is sensible to start by describing the characteristics of the "old" internal labor market of managers.
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From page 82... ...
For most managers, upward mobility is much less probable than it used to be. The use of task or project teams that come together for specific, temporary tasks and then disappear replaces permanent bureaucratic hierarchies and, in the process, reduces the number of levels in the organizations.
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From page 83... ...
Teams, Teamwork, and Team-Work The rise of team-based work structures is perhaps the most ubiquitous change affecting the workplace in the past two decades. The shift from individualized work structures to teams spread from production work to the executive suite and every area in between, forcing revisions in compensation systems, organizational charts, and corporate culture.
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From page 84... ...
There may be less mobility in the new team model, particularly when jobs are organized according to principles of scientific management, which has broadened individual jobs by eliminating narrow, hierarchical occupational structures. Employees in these new cross-functional teams may be much less likely to identify with a skill and the job defined around it, such as crafts (e.g., "machinist")
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From page 85... ...
, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and by independent researchers (the National Establishment Survey)
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From page 86... ...
CHANGING EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS Organizational restructuring sets off a chain reaction of additional changes in the terms and conditions of employment. In this section we review the most important of these changes.
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From page 87... ...
Ultimately, this question calls for an analysis as detailed as that applied to job stability and job security. Although an analysis based on retention rates is required to draw firm conclusions, Table 3.2 nonetheless reports some preliminary calculations based simply on the distributions of incomplete spells of occupational tenure in the 1983 and 1991 Current
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From page 88... ...
88 THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK TABLE 3.2 Changes in Employer and Occupational Tenure Occupational Tenure 1983 1991 1983 1991 (1 )
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From page 89... ...
Overall, then, although this evidence is very preliminary, it suggests that occupational tenure has not declined, and that workers are, if anything, remaining in their occupations somewhat longer. Networking Opportunities If managerial and skilled employees in particular find better prospects in careers that span organizations, they must somehow develop mechanisms for getting information about opportunities elsewhere and for securing new positions.
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From page 90... ...
Trade unions and professional associations might also provide alternative mechanisms for employees to use both as sources of information and job mobility and as mechanisms for defining their identity in the workplace. Craft unions have long served those functions and have helped to structure labor markets in many industries, such as construction, through the creation of hiring halls and other mechanisms.
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From page 91... ...
Evidence suggests that this traditional or standard arrangement is becoming less common, though perhaps it was never as prevalent as its impact would otherwise suggest. Replacing it are a series of nonstandard work arrangements such as regular parttime employment, working for a temporary help agency, working for a contract company, on-call work or day labor, independent contracting, and other forms of self-employment.
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From page 92... ...
Nonstandard work arrangements are often associated with
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From page 93... ...
Nonstandard workers also tend to receive lower wages than regular full-time workers with similar personal characteristics and educational qualifications, although the extent of these wage gaps shrink once occupation, industry, and union status are taken into account. Workers in nonstandard work arrangements are also much less likely to receive fringe benefits, such as health insurance and pensions.
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From page 94... ...
The growth of nonstandard work arrangements represents a change in the work context that has implications for a number of issues discussed in this book. Instead of the employer controlling one's work, for example, persons in some nonstandard work arrangements either control their own work (along the lines of independent contractors and other self-employed persons)
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From page 95... ...
For example, a comparison of the Training Magazine surveys in 1988 and 1997 shows increasing proportions of organizations offering courses in creativity, strategic planning, and managing change (Lakewood Research, 1988, 1997~. New technologies were the most significant issue affecting training practices, according to a Human Performance Practices survey conducted by the American Society for Training Developers (ASTD)
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From page 96... ...
And the number of older students in college, most of whom are working or have work experience, has been growing more than the number of younger students, especially among women. The question of declining job security and stability raised earlier also has important implications for training.
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From page 97... ...
Employers may also find that they rely more on trying to create a corporate culture that effectively substitutes for direct supervision by conveying norms and values that govern performance. If so, then issues of employee "fit" with the culture will become more important.
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From page 98... ...
When social/psychological contracts are in force, the assumption is that the employment relationship is long term and that the employer has policies that will benefit the employee in the long run. These include income security, in the form of stable careers and lucrative pensions.
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From page 99... ...
When psychological contracts are violated, declines in employee morale are one consequence and others may include an increase in quit rates and declines in performance. The American Management Association found that 72 percent of its surveyed companies that had cut jobs reported an immediate and negative impact on morale, including an increase in absenteeism and disability ciaims.2 Employee attitudes also seem to suffer.
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From page 100... ...
Among recent business school graduates hired into their first job after graduation, for example, she found that they still saw their employers as having substantial obligations to them; the employees trusted that those obligations would be honored. And when those obligations were breached, the employees responded by reducing their own obligations and self-reported measures of performance and commitment (Robinson, 1996~.
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From page 101... ...
Employer efforts to articulate a new deal governing the employment relationship have been driven by an understanding within organizations of the profound way in which they have unilaterally broken the old deal and concerns about the possible negative consequences that doing so may have on employee behavior. Most of these efforts have focused on being explicit about the limits on employer obligations, simply being clear that the employer can no longer guarantee job security and that employees have to look out for themselves.
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From page 102... ...
The rise of nonstandard work is perhaps the best example, but there is also greater variety in how tasks are performed (e.g., the amount of teamwork and employee involvement)
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From page 103... ...
In general, narrow jobs have given way to broader jobs; management positions, especially those in middle management, have been cut, leading to flatter organizational charts and much wider spans of control. Traditional boundaries around jobs, such as the distinction between managerial and production work, white-collar and blue-collar jobs, the barriers around craft work, and the narrow job descriptions of production jobs associated with scientific management have all blurred.
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From page 104... ...
To be accurate, occupational classification systems must therefore be updated more frequently. And, as we suggest in Chapter 5, if they are to become a significant aid to decision makers whose actions are shaping work structures, they will need to be transformed from backwardlooking tools that describe and classify jobs to more forward-Iooking analytic tools that generate options for how work might be structured in the future.
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