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Downsizing as a Strategic Tool for Effective Organizational Management: A Case Study of Nigerian Banks

Downsizing, in recent years, have assumed a commonplace in various organisations. The views of various practitioners and in fact results of various studies indicates that these initiatives, albeit, intended to produce positive results, often do more harm than good to some organisations, workforce and their performance. The unending quest for lower costs, higher productivity and fatter profits have often led to the wielding of the ''big stick''. Organisations of varying sizes and shapes have used downsizing as a cost cutting management strategy, however, the untold stories are the actual cost of these exercise to the organisation, performance and it's far reaching implications to the workforce. This paper explored the costs and implications of the massive wave of redundancies in the workforce in Nigerian banks. With the help of data obtained from open-ended interviews conducted with various stakeholders in downsizing operations and applied within a clinical framework, individual reaction patterns are explored in the victims, the survivors and the executioners. Among the victims and survivors within the Nigerian setting, a number of ways of coping can be discerned, and described as compulsive, abrasive, dissociate and depressive. Findings revealed a plethora of mixed feelings among various employees and expose the far reaching implications both to the organisations, affected individuals (victims) and the psyche of their co-workers (survivors). The article ends with a number of practical recommendations. I. INTRODUCTION Organisations all over the world are striving to look leaner and more profitable. Hence excess staff, machinery and costs are done away with. Unfortunately, an insidious response to this understanding comes in the form of downsizing. The massive waves of mergers and acquisitions occasioned by the dull economic climate since 2008 have the potential to create a sense of fear and anxiety of job losses among all employees in all cadres in every organisation. Though there are elaborate literatures on redundancies, the focus has, however, been on positive impacts of the exercise to various organisations. This paper therefore explores in detail the costs and implications of downsizing from a tripartite perspective of the organization (executioners), employees (survivors) and the affected individuals (victims). This study therefore aims to evaluate downsizing as a strategic tool for effective organisational management using selected banks as a case study and data will be gathered from face to face interviews with managers of various banks. The research question based on the above will be: