Encouraging organizational learning through pay after a corporate downsizing
探讨裁员后，基于个人的薪酬体系（如技能/能力薪酬或宽带薪酬）能否通过鼓励员工学习新技能，缓解财务困境并减少对留任员工的负面影响。
Corporate downsizing has been implemented by a large number of American firms in an effort to become more flexible and responsive to increased competition. The results associated with these downsizings have not been as stellar as researchers and practitioners had hoped. In fact, fewer than half of downsized firms reported achieving any reduction in costs (Hitt, Keats, Harback and Nixon, 1994). In addition to these dismal financial indicators, the effects of downsizing on the remaining employees have been substantial, including increased stress, reduced career opportunities and decreased company loyalty. This article looks at the possibility that person-based compensation systems such as skill/competency based pay or broad banding may alleviate some of the problems associated with both the poor financial performance and the negative impact on survivors of downsizing. By encouraging employees to acquire new skills and knowledge, person-based pay programs may foster the development of a highly flexible workforce. Employees with wider skills may prove valuable to downsized firms coping with large losses in organizational knowledge and memory. Throughout the last two decades, many corporations have undergone extensive efforts to reengineer themselves. This reengineering, for the most part, has resulted in massive downsizing, presumably in an effort to become more competitive in the marketplace (Bowman and Singh, 1993). The underlying assumption of these downsizings has been that the bureaucracies, developed by some of these companies, hampered their ability to respond efficiently and effectively against new levels of competition. Despite the initial claims that downsizing would enhance firms’ performances by making them more flexible, there is little research showing organizational performance increases as a result of these changes (Hitt, Keats, Harback and Nixon, 1994). Potentially, one reason for these results is because as firms downsize, they let go of one critical competitive advantage: their people. Drastic reductions in staffing, such as those of downsizing, affect many aspects of the firms’ capabilities to perform not only because of the employees who were downsized out of firms, but also because of it’s effects on employees who remain, the survivors. The employees, lost during downsizing, possess unique knowledge which facilitated the firms’ performances in the past (Walsh and Ungson, 1991). These employees owned technical expertise and industry specific knowledge necessary for the firms to compete. They stored organizational memory that is now gone from the companies. Potentially, they were key people in information net