The Impact of Layoffs on Survivors: An Organizational Justice Perspective

The Ohio State University Job layoffs have long been a matter of great concern to organizational scholars and practitioners. Most of the theoretical, empirical, and applied work on layoffs has focused on the antecedents of layoffs or the consequences of layoffs for those people who have been laid off. This chapter describes some of the author's theory and research on the effects of layoffs on those who remain. It presents a conceptualization derived from the theory and research on justice in interpersonal relationships, especially as they apply to organizational settings. The chapter explores some forms of justice in the layoff process, such as distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. The chapter includes four studies: the first three were performed under controlled laboratory conditions, in which student subjects observed another subject being "laid off" from a paid task and the fourth study was conducted in a naturalistic setting in which actual layoffs occurred in branches of a retail company.