Analyse du discours de travailleurs confrontés à des changements organisationnels : une perspective transactionnelle .

Downsizing, restructuring and lay-offs have become recurrent practices among companies today. Whilst the consequences of such major changes on individual well-being are well documented, little is known about the nature of work environment changes. confronting workers and how they appraise these events. The objective of the present study was to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to get a better understanding of organizational changes from a transactional perspective. Fifty-seven workers-from seven companies were interviewed. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed along three axes (a) What were the changes confronting workers ? (b) How did they react to these changes (c) How did they perceive the way their company dealt with these changes ? Results indicate that workers were mainly confronted with changes among colleagues and supervisors, changes in terms of workload as weft as task content. Moreover, it appears that not all changes were appraised negatively. With regard to the. consequences. reported by, workers, the findings reported in existing literature were generally supported by the current data. Workers reported a. general deterioration of their quality of life, a degradation of working climate and an increase in job insecurity as a result of organizational changes. Finally, workers indicated that the way companies managed changes was not really efficient. Workers complained mainly about information. They reported that they were either poorly informed or not informed at all about future changes. In conclusion, this study stresses the need for a qualitative analysis of the experience of workers confronted with organisational changes.