The effect of employees’ expectations about downsizing on performance outcomes
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2025-08-25
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en
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This study examines how non-management employees’ expectations about downsizing affect individual and team performance. While prior research primarily focused on organizational-level performance or managerial expectations, this study addresses the individual and team-level performance and the impact of non-management employees’ expectations rather than management employees’ expectations. Grounded in Cognitive Dissonance Theory, an experiment was conducted with 90 participants from different manufacturing organizations whereby participants had to solve a list of anagrams in teams of five. Expectations were manipulated via vignettes and primes into positive, neutral, or negative expectations. Individual performance was measured through self-evaluation, while team-level performance was measured based on completion time. The results suggest that downsizing significantly decreases team performance in a linear way, while no significant effect was found for individual performance. Neither positive nor negative expectations of the non-management employees did give significant differences in individual or team performance outputs. These findings suggest that non-management employees’ expectations are not determinants of the post-downsizing performance of non-management employees.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen