• if you were the manager of a global operation, how would you ensure that an employee’s culture did not negatively impact the selection assessment?

Note: Make sure you read chapter 6 and be sure to pull information from this chapter.  Pay particular attention to the info starting on page 162.  The section on pages 169-170 will also be helpful.  This question is specifically about selection assessment.

chapter 6 : 

If you’re looking for the best Parmesan cheese for your chicken parmigiana recipe, you might try Wegmans, especially if you happen to live in the vicinity of Pittsford, New York. Cheese department manager Carol Kent will be happy to recommend the best brand because her job calls for knowing cheese as well as managing some twenty subordinates. Kent is a knowledgeable employee, and knowledgeable employees, says Wegmans’ CEO Danny Wegman, are “something our competitors don’t have and our customers couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Wegmans Food Markets, a family-owned East Coast chain with 83 outlets in 6 states, prides itself on its commitment to customers, and it shows: It ranks at the top of the latest Consumer Reports survey of the best national and regional grocery stores. But commitment to customers is only half of Wegmans’ overall strategy, which calls for reaching its customers through its employees. “How do we differentiate ourselves?” asks Wegman, who then proceeds to answer his own question: “If we can sell products that require knowledge in terms of how you use them, that’s our strategy. Anything that requires knowledge and service gives us a reason to be.” That’s the logic behind one of Carol Kent’s recent assignments, one which she understandably regards as a perk: Wegmans sent her to Italy to conduct a personal study of Italian cheese. “We sat with the families” that make the cheeses, she recalls, “broke bread with them. It helped me understand that we’re not just selling a piece of cheese. We’re selling a tradition, a quality.”

Kent and the employees in her department also enjoy the best benefits package in the industry, including fully paid health insurance. And that includes part-timers, who make up about two-thirds of the company’s workforce of more than 44,000. In part, the strategy of extending benefits to this large segment of the labor force is intended to make sure that stores have enough good workers for crucial peak periods, but there’s no denying that the costs of employee-friendly policies can mount up. At 15 to 17 percent of sales, for example, Wegmans’ labor costs are well above the 12 percent figure for most supermarkets. But according to one company HR executive, holding down labor costs isn’t necessarily a strategic priority: “We would have stopped offering free health insurance [to part-timers] a long time ago,” she admits, “if we tried to justify the costs.”

Besides, employee turnover at Wegmans is about 7 percent— a mere fraction of an industry average that hovers around 19 percent (and can approach 100 percent for part-timers). And this is an industry in which total turnover costs have been known to outstrip total annual profits by 40 percent. Wegmans employees tend to be knowledgeable because about 20 percent of them have been with the company for at least 10 years, and many have logged at least a quarter century. Says one 19-year-old college student who works at an upstate-New York Wegmans while pursuing a career as a high school history teacher: “I love this place. If teaching doesn’t work out, I would so totally work at Wegmans.” Edward McLaughlin, who directs the Food Industry Management Program at Cornell University, understands this sort of attitude: “When you’re a 16-year-old kid, the last thing you want to do is wear a geeky shirt and work for a supermarket,” but at Wegmans, he explains, “it’s a badge of honor. You sell pro ducts that re quire re not a geeky cashier. You’re part of the social fabric.”

Wegmans placed third in Fortune magazine’s 2013 annual list of “100 Best Companies to Work For”—good for 15 consecutive years on the list and seven straight top-ten finishes. “It says that we’re doing something right,” says a company spokesperson, “and that there’s no better way to take care of our customers than to be a great place for our employees to work.” In addition to its health-care package, Wegmans has been cited for such perks as fitness center discounts, compressed work weeks, telecommuting, and domestic-partner benefits (which extend to same-sex partners).

Finally, under the company’s Employee Scholarship Program, full-time workers can receive up to $2,200 a year for 4 years, and part-timers up to $1,500. Since its inception in 1984, the program has handed out $90 million in scholarships to more than 28,400 employees. Like most Wegman policies, this one combines employee outreach with long-term corporate strategy: “This program has made a real difference in the lives of many young people,”says president Colleen Wegman, who adds that it’s also“one of the reasons we’ve been able to attract the best and the brightest to work at Wegmans.”

Granted, Wegmans, which has remained in family hands since its founding in 1915, has an advantage in being as generous with its resources as its family of top executives wants to be: It doesn’t have to do everything with quarterly profits in mind, and the firm likes to point out that taking care of its employees is a longstanding priority. Profit sharing and fully funded medical coverage were introduced in 1950 by Robert Wegman, son and nephew of brothers Walter and John, who opened the firm’s original flagship store in Rochester, New York, in 1930. Why did Robert Wegman make such generous gestures to his employees way back then? “Because,” he says simply, “I was no different from them.”1

THINK IT OVER

1. Why don’t more firms use Wegmans’ approach to dealing with employees?

2. What factors might theoretically cause Wegmans to change its approach in the future?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After studying this chapter you should be able to:

6-1 Discuss the role of ethics in human resource decision making

6-2 Describe the concept of rightsizing and identify organizational strategies for rightsizing

6-3 Describe how to manage termination and retention

6-4 Describe the elements of voluntary turnover

6-5 Discuss the key human resource issues during mergers and acquisitions

In Chapter 5, we discussed some of the sources of information for making human resource management (HRM) decisions. In this chapter and the next, we will discuss the details of some of those decisions that are made on a regular basis. Chapter 7 will describe the details of how organizations recruit and select employees for organizations. This chapter looks at decisions about the size of an organization; that is, our focus here is the decisions about how many employees should be on the payroll at any time. This is often referred to as the headcount. We will discuss both temporary and more permanent decisions that can be made about headcounts, and we will also discuss some special problems about the size of an organization’s workforce after a merger or acquisition. Before dealing with any of these decisions, we begin by discussing the importance of ethics in decision making.

6-1 ETHICS AND HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

In Chapter 2, we discussed how the legal framework provided a set of parameters for human resource management decisions, and, as noted above, we discussed various sources of information for these decisions in the previous chapter. But ethics is another important aspect of decision making for all managers, not just human resource (HR) managers.2 Ethics is a separate concept from the law but is closely intertwined. Ethics refers to an individual’s beliefs about what is right and wrong and what is good and bad. Ethics are formed by the societal context in which people and organizations function. In recent years, ethical behavior and ethical conduct on the part of managers and organizations have received considerable attention, usually fueled by scandals at firms such as Enron, WorldCom, Imclone, and Tyco International and unscrupulous managers such as Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Bernard Madoff. The basic premise is that laws are passed by governments to control and dictate appropriate behavior and conduct in a society. The concept of ethics serves much the same purpose because of its premise about what is right and what is wrong.

Ethics refers to an individual’s beliefs about what is right and wrong and what is good and bad. Ethics are formed by the societal context in which people and organizations function.

But ethics and law do not always coincide precisely. For example, it may be perfectly legal for a manager to take a certain action, but some observers might find his or her action to be unethical. For example, an organization undergoing a major cutback might be legally able to terminate a specific employee who is nearing retirement age, but if that employee has a long history of dedicated service to the organization, then many people could consider termination to be ethically questionable. Managers from every part of the organization must take steps to ensure that their behavior is both ethical and legal. Some organizations develop codes of conduct or ethical statements in an attempt to communicate publicly their stance on ethics and ethical conduct.

Managers must take steps to ensure that their behavior is both ethical and legal.

The various scandals of the 1990s raised many public questions about the ethical training and orientation of managers. A survey published in USA Today created even more questions. In that survey of 443 master’s of business administration (MBA) students, more than 50 percent responded that they would buy stock based on insider information, more than 25 percent said they would allow a gift to influence a company purchasing decision, and more than 10 percent said they make a payoff to help close a deal.3 Even more serious questions of business ethics emerged in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2009, and the financial crises of 2010–2011.

Following the near collapse of several major banks and financial institutions, the U.S. government instituted its Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to provide billions of dollars in loans to institutions such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. By the end of 2011, every one of these firms had repaid the loans, and were, for the most part, reasonably healthy financially. It does seem clear, however, that many of these institutions would never have survived without the federal funds. The problems really arose, however, over the year-end bonuses the companies were paying to their executives. We will discuss executive compensation more fully in Chapter 9, but suffice it to say that Wall Street firms paid multimillion dollar bonuses to top executives in early 2010. There was no question that these bonuses were perfectly legal, but questions were raised about the ethics of paying out huge bonuses to executives while many Americans were unemployed or struggling financially—especially when the firms were in a position to pay those bonuses only because of government bailout dollars. In fact, in early 2010, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, sent a letter to eight of the nation’s largest banks demanding to know how they structured those bonus payouts.4

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk.… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
—MARK Zuckerberg,
co-founder of Facebook

© Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images

One interesting ethical challenge facing an organization became apparent when Internet search provider Google announced that it was going to close its operations in China.5 The huge company had formally entered China in 2005 (although it had provided a Chinese-language version of Google since 2000). As the company saw its market share shrink, however, Google’s executives realized they must formally enter the Chinese market. The problem was that Google considered itself a company that was socially responsible; to enter the Chinese market, the company had to agree to a certain level of censorship required by the government. Not only was information that was critical of government policies censored but also there was evidence that the Chinese government used Internet access to track down and prosecute dissidents within China.

To access the hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users, Google agreed to this censorship, even though it was clearly at odds with Google’s corporate philosophy and what most Americans would consider ethical behavior.6As a result, in January 2010 Google announced that it had uncovered a Chinese government plot to use e-mail attachments to get access to sensitive information and to identify political dissidents, and this was seen as going too far. The source of the attacks has been speculated to be students at Chinese universities. In March 2010, Google transplanted its Chinese operations to Hong Kong. This case illustrates how some companies must balance ethics with profits, and how complicated it is to maintain a real balance.

This case also helps illustrate how the scope of business ethics can be even more complicated when one thinks about the global environment of modern business. Different countries and different cultures have different values and norms, and this translates into different ideas about what kinds of behaviors are ethical and what kinds are unethical. Specifically, nations and cultures differ in what they see as acceptable behaviors relative to corruption, exploitation of labor, and environmental impact. Transparency International, a global coalition fighting corruption, publishes a list of the countries perceived to be the least and the most corrupt in the world. In their latest survey, they found Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore to be perceived as the least corrupt countries in the world. Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Myanmar were perceived to be the most corrupt. The United States was ranked as being perceived to be the nineteenth least corrupt country.7 Thus, it is important to recognize that one’s sense of ethics is always part of any decision made, but that individuals as well as countries can differ in terms of their sense of what constitutes ethical behavior. We will refer back to questions of ethics throughout these next two chapters.

6-2 RIGHTSIZING THE ORGANIZATIONS

One of the more basic decisions an organization must make concerning human resources is the size of the workforce. Whether a company is forecasting revenue growth or decline, the number of its employees must be adjusted to fit the changing needs of the business. In all cases, therefore, it is essential that the organization, through the HRM function, manage the size of its workforce effectively. This process is called rightsizing, and it is the process of monitoring and adjusting the organization’s workforce to its optimal size and composition.

Rightsizing is the process of monitoring and adjusting the composition of the organization’s workforce to its optimal size.

If not for the intervention of the U.S. government, many large banks and financial institutions would have failed during the recent recession.

© Norman Chan/Shutterstock.com

Managing the size of the workforce may, in turn, involve layoffs or early-retirement programs to reduce the size of the workforce, retention programs to maintain the size of the workforce, and using temporary workers as a bridge between the current state of affairs and either growth or reduction. In any case, the organization must ensure that it has the “right”people. Reduction, retention, or any other strategy affecting the size and composition of the workforce must target the specific types of employees the organization would like to eliminate or keep. For the most part, organizations choose to retain highly committed, highly motivated, and productive employees and would prefer to lose less committed and less productive employees. How an organization achieves this goal while staying within the limits of the law is one major focus of this chapter.

Over the past three decades, people in the United States have witnessed firsthand the cyclical nature of economic forces. In the 1980s, numerous layoffs and workforce reductions occurred at U.S. firms, primarily as the firms adjusted to increased global competition. Both academic researchers and the popular press discussed at length the best ways to manage layoffs and the challenges of dealing with their survivors. Then the economy began to grow at an unprecedented rate in the 1990s, and expert opinion began to focus more on recommendations for recruiting and retaining valuable employees. Then came September 11, 2001, and its aftermath: The economy slowed, and workforce reductions began again. By the middle of 2002, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its sharpest decline since the Great Depression, and layoffs and reductions were again the order of the day. This time, however, most organizations took a more strategic approach than they had in the 1980s; as a result, many were in a good position to capitalize when markets rebounded again in 2006. In late 2008 and early 2009, however, things took a turn for the worse. Problems with bad mortgages led to foreclosures, banks that had invested in mortgage-backed securities began to have serious problems, and there were massive layoffs. In fact, as noted earlier in the chapter, if it had not been for the intervention of the U.S. government, many large banks and financial institutions would have failed during 2009. The economy began showing signs of recovery by 2010, but unemployment problems lingered and did not drop below 9 percent until 2012. By June 2013, the unemployment rate was hovering around 7.6 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new record high in July 2013, and by then the housing market had demonstrated several months of steady improvement. Throughout the first half of 2014, the stock market continued to get stronger, there was continued job growth, and unemployment claims went down to their lowest levels since 2007. Nonetheless, the United States was still plagued by economic uncertainty in the middle of 2014, and many believed that this uncertainty was preventing companies from expanding hiring even further.

How, then, do organizations manage the size of their workforces to deal with their current needs and potential future economic realities? One important, short-term solution is the use of temporary or  

contingent workers, who provide a buffer for the organization. When facing declining needs for employees, the organization can simply decide not to renew the contracts of temporary workers or end their relationship with contingent workers in other ways. When facing increasing demand for employees, the organization can increase overtime or hire contingent workers until it determines if it will need more permanent workers. Once the need for permanent employees is established, companies must deal with the recruitment and selection issues discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is more concerned with temporary fixes for increased demand and the special issues that face an organization with declining demands for employees: These are the true focus of any discussion of rightsizing. We begin with an examination of the increased demands for employees.

© Khakimullin Aleksandr/Shutterstock.com

6-2a Dealing with Increased Demand for Employees

When an organization anticipates an increased need for employees, the traditional approach has been to recruit and hire new permanent employees. In recent years, that model has changed. Specifically, if the demand for new employees is not expected to last, or if it would take a long time to find the needed permanent employees, then a firm may try a more temporary solution—at least for awhile. This is the case, for example, when the increased need for employees is part of a normal and well-understood cycle such as the practice of retailers hiring temporary help during November and December.

The easiest way to deal with a temporary increase in the demand for employees is to offer overtimeopportunities, which simply means asking current workers to put in longer hours for extra pay. As noted, this alternative is especially beneficial when the increased need for human resources is short term. For example, a manufacturing plant facing a production crunch might ask some of its production workers to work an extra half-day, perhaps on Saturday, for 2 or 3 weeks to get the work done. An advantage to this approach is that it gives employees the opportunity to earn extra income. Some employees welcome this opportunity and are thankful to the organization for making it available. In addition, it keeps the organization from having to hire and train new employees because the existing employees already know how to do their work.

Overtime refers to hours worked above the normal 40-hour workweek, for which there is usually a pay premium.

On the other hand, labor costs per hour are likely to increase. The Fair Labor Standards Act (described earlier in Chapter 2 and discussed further in Chapter 9) stipulates that employees who work more than 40 hours a week must be compensated at a rate of one and a half times their normal hourly rate. Furthermore, if the organization doesn’t really need all the members of a work group for overtime, then it may face a complicated situation in deciding who gets to work the overtime. Unionized organizations often have contracts that specify the decision rules that must be followed when offering overtime. Finally, there is the problem of potential increased fatigue and anxiety on the part of employees, particularly if the overtime is not particularly welcome and if they have to work the overtime for an extended period of time.

Another increasingly popular alternative to hiring permanent employees is a growing reliance on temporary employees. The idea behind temporary employment is that an organization can hire someone for only a specific period of time, and a major advantage to the organization is that such workers can usually be paid a lower rate, although they are now more likely to be entitled to the same benefits as full-time workers.8 Considerable flexibility comes from the fact that employees themselves realize their jobs are not permanent, so the organization can terminate their relationship as work demands mandate.9 On the other hand, temporary employees tend not to understand the organization’s culture as well as permanent employees. In addition, they are not as likely to be as productive as permanent full-time employees of the organization.

Employee leasing is yet another alternative. An organization can pay a fee to a leasing company that provides a pool of employees to the client firm. This pool of employees usually constitutes a group or crew intended to handle all or most of the organization’s work needs in a particular area. For example, an organization might lease a crew of custodial and other maintenance workers from an outside firm specializing in such services. These workers appear in the organization every day at a predetermined time and perform all maintenance and custodial work. To the general public, they may even appear to be employees of the firm occupying the building. In reality, however, they work for a leasing company.

Employee leasing involves an organization paying a fee to a leasing company that provides a pool of employees who are available on a temporary basis. This pool of employees usually constitutes a group or crew intended to handle all or most of the organization’s work needs in a particular area.

The Fair Labor Standards Act stipulates that hourly workers must be compensated at a rate of one and a half times their normal hourly rate for work in excess hours of 40 hours per week.

© iStockphoto.com/Sachin Bhavsar

The basic advantage to the organization is that it essentially outsources to the leasing firm the HR elements of recruiting, hiring, training, compensating, and evaluating those employees. On the other hand, because the individuals are not employees of the firm, they are likely to have less commitment and attachment to it. In addition, the cost of the leasing arrangement might be a bit higher than if the employees have been hired directly by the firm itself.

Our final alternative to hiring permanent workers is to rely on part-time workers, or individuals who routinely expect to work fewer than 40 hours a week. Among the major advantages of part-time employment is the fact that these employees are usually not covered by benefits, thus lowering labor costs, and the organization can achieve considerable flexibility. The part-time workers are routinely called on to work different schedules from week to week, thereby allowing the organization to cluster its labor force around peak demand times and have a smaller staff on hand during downtimes. Part-time workers are common in organizations such as restaurants. Wait staff, bus persons, kitchen help, and other employees might be college students who want to work only 15 or 20 hours a week to earn spending money. Their part-time interest provides considerable scheduling flexibility to the organization that hires them.

Part-time workers refers to individuals who are regularly expected to work less than 40 hours a week. They typically do not receive benefits and afford the organization a great deal of flexibility in staffing.

Each group of employees described in the preceding can be considered part of the contingent workforce, which includes (1) all temporary employees, (2) all part-time employees, and (3) all part-time employees who are employed by organizations to fill in for permanent employees during peak demand. Thus, these contingent workers are considered alternatives to recruiting, but usually as alternatives that are less desirable. Some recent views of staffing take a more strategic perspective, however, and suggest that there may be situations when it would be preferable to hire temporary or contingent workers instead of permanent employees.10

In this view, whenever a firm requires additional human resources unrelated to its core competencies or required to have skills or knowledge that is generally available in the marketplace, then it may be to the firm’s competitive advantage to add resources through some other arrangement besides permanent hires. Eventually, though, it may become clear that the firm needs to hire more permanent employees, and that is the focus of the next chapter. For now, we turn instead to the situation in which rightsizing requires the firm to reduce the number of employees.

6-2b Dealing with a Declining Need for Employees

There are also cases in which an organization needs fewer employees. If the organization employs a large contingent workforce, then the easiest solution is to cut those workers and simply retain its core of permanent employees. This approach works best in cyclical industries in which demand increases and decreases with the time of year, such as farming and its use of migrant farmworkers. But dealing with more permanent decreases in the demand for employees is more problematic, although there are some approaches we can discuss for this possibility as well.

Early retirements and natural attrition can be used when it is possible to plan systematically for a gradual decrease in the workforce. In some cases, organizations can even conduct planning exercises that may suggest the need to reduce the workforce over the next few years. This reduction may result from anticipated changes in technology or customer bases or even to anticipated changes in corporate or business strategies. The organization can attempt to manage the reduction by simply not replacing workers who leave voluntarily, or by providing incentives for other employees to retire early, or both.

Clearly, a certain number of employees will retire every year in any mature organization, which can reduce the size of the workforce by simply not replacing those retired employees. But what if normal retirement rates are not expected to be enough to produce the necessary reductions? In those cases, the organization can offer certain types of incentives to convince some employees to retire earlier than they had planned.

Perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interpersonal justice affect reactions to layoffs.

For example, in an organization that has a defined benefit retirement plan (see Chapter 9), the pension that an employee earns at retirement is a function of (among other things) the number of years that person has worked and her or his salary. An organization could simply announce that those who are thinking about retiring will automatically have, say, 3 years added to their years of service if they make a decision to retire by a certain date. As a result, employees could feel comfortable about retiring 3 years earlier than they had planned. An organization could also increase the rate at which it matches employee contributions to 401(k) plans (also discussed in Chapter 9) or in some other way make it financially more attractive for employees to retire early. Some firms actually provide employees with opportunities to learn more about wealth management so they are better able to take advantage of early retirement opportunities. But, in all cases, these plans must truly be voluntary or the organization may encounter legal problems. By definition, early-retirement plans target older workers, so any attempt—real or perceived—to coerce them into leaving can be construed as age discrimination. As noted in Chapter 2, age discrimination toward older workers is illegal.

© Kheng Guan Toh/Shutterstock.com

6-2c Strategies for Layoffs

In many cases, there is not enough warning to rely on early retirements, or the early retirement strategy simply does not result in enough decrease in employee numbers. In these cases, it is usually necessary to reduce the workforce through layoffs. Layoffs are not popular for obvious reasons. When notified of a layoff, some employees decide to sue the organization for wrongful termination. In these cases, the former employee alleges that the organization violated a contract or a law in deciding who to terminate. Even if an employee does not pursue legal remedies, many employees who have lost their jobs develop negative feelings toward their former employer. These feelings usually manifest themselves through negative comments made to other people or refusing to conduct personal business with their former employer. In some extreme cases, they may even result in aggressive or violent responses directed at those perceived to be responsible. Hundreds of such attacks occur each year, and several dozen result in the loss of life. For these reasons, it is critical that layoffs be carried out humanely and carefully.

A critical determinant of an employee’s reaction to being laid off is his or her perceptions of the justice involved in the layoff process. Three types of justice—distributive, procedural, and interactional—seem to be related to reactions to layoffs.11

1. Distributive justice refers to perceptions that the outcomes a person faces are fair when compared to the outcomes faced by others. This type of justice is often important in determining an employee’s reactions to pay decisions, for example. Most experts believe that these perceptions are based on both the actual outcomes faced (e.g., how much I am paid, whether or not I lose my job) and the perceptions of what others have contributed.12For example, a person may be paid less than his co-worker, but if he can see that she contributes more to the company than he does and that the difference in the pay is proportional to the difference in contributions each makes, then he can still view the outcome as fair. Others argue, however, that unequal outcomes alone lead to perceptions of low distributive justice and when someone loses his or her job but someone else does not, then it is difficult to see how this difference in outcome can be linked to differences in contribution.13

Distributive justice refers to perceptions that the outcomes a person faces are fair when compared to the outcomes faced by others.

TABLE 6.1 Critical Dimensions of Procedural Justice

Voice: The perception that the person had some control over the outcome or some voice in the decision.Consistency: The perception that the rules were applied the same way to everyone involved.Free from bias: The perception that the person applying the rules had no vested interest in the outcome of the decision.Information accuracy: The perception that the information used to make the decision was accurate and complete.Possibility of correction: The perception that some mechanism exists to correct flawed or inaccurate decisions.Ethicality: The perception that the decision rules conform to personal or prevailing standards of ethics and morality.Representativeness: The perception that the opinions of the various groups affected by the decision have been considered in the decision.

Source: Adapted from Jason Colquitt, Donald Conlon, Michael Wesson, Christopher Porter, and K. Yee Ng, “Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review of 25 Years of Organizational Justice Research,” Journal of Applied Psychology (2001), 86: 425–445.

2. Nonetheless, those who lose their jobs may still react reasonably as long as they feel that the organization has not also violated another type of justice—procedural justice—or perceptions that the process used to determine the outcomes was fair. Thus, an employee who loses his or her job may be less angry if everyone in a department also lost their jobs or if layoffs were based on objective and accepted criteria. Several models of procedural justice have been proposed, and these models have yielded the dimensions of procedural justice presented in Table 6.1.

Procedural justice refers to perceptions that the process used to determine the outcomes were fair.

It is also clear, however, that an employee (or any other observer) will judge a process to be fair when it leads to an outcome that is favorable.14 This perspective explains why most students generally consider fair tests to be the ones they perform best on. It is also why employees who do not lose their jobs are more likely to view the basis for layoff decisions as being more just (see, however, the discussion on the survivor syndrome).

3. Finally, a third dimension of justice, interactional justice, refers to the quality of the interpersonal treatment people receive when a decision is implemented.15 Thus, employees losing their jobs will feel that the decision was more just if it is communicated to them in a considerate, respectful, and polite manner. In fact, scholars have proposed more recently that there are two separate dimensions to interactional justice. The first dimension deals with the extent to which the person was treated with respect and dignity when he or she was told about the decision, while the second dimension refers to the extent to which the decision maker provides information about the decision rules used and how they were applied. These two dimensions have been called interpersonal justiceand informational justice, respectively.16

Interactional justice refers to the quality of the interpersonal treatment people receive when a decision is implemented.

The human resource manager who has to deal with layoffs should consider these justice issues. Basically, they suggest that necessary layoffs should be implemented using a well-formulated strategy that can be communicated to and understood by the employees and follows the rules implied by the dimensions of procedural justice in Table 6.1. Finally, the decisions should be communicated in a way that conveys respect and caring for the people involved.

Of course, the actual strategy used for determining who will be laid off must also be reasonable. As noted above, a layoff strategy that targets older workers is probably illegal and would rarely be considered as fair. Sometimes, layoff decisions are made on the basis of performance; that is, the organization decides to lay off its poorest performers. But how does an organization decide who these employees are? Typically, this decision is based on past performance appraisals, but, as we shall see in Chapter 10, performance appraisals are far from perfect and prone to various biases. When layoff decisions are based on performance ratings, those ratings take on the role of employment tests. In other words, because the organization is making a decision based on the performance ratings, the courts consider the performance ratings to be employment tests. Thus, if there is evidence of disparate impact in the layoffs, the organization will need to demonstrate that the performance ratings are job related or valid. This process is not always simple, as we shall see in the next chapter. In addition, the layoff strategy