Contemporary issues in UK business organisations: The implications for employee wellbeing

2 Prof. Les Worrall, Associate Dean (Research), Management Research Centre, University of Wolverhampton Business School, Telford Campus, Telford, TF2 9NT, UK Over the last ten years, the pace and scale of organisational change in the UK has been both considerable and persistent as firms have continually had to adapt to rapid changes in their operating environments. Globalisation has had a major impact on many business organisations as profits have become harder to make in many businesses as margins have been squeezed. The increasing emphasis on ‘efficiency’ has, in both the private and public sectors, had the effect of causing most organisations to take out costs or, in some cases particularly in the private sector, to export production to lower cost, less regulated economies in Eastern Europe or the Far East. Our continuing research at the national level in the UK, has identified that persistent organisational change and adaptation have become the norm. In our ‘Quality of Working Life’ research (Worrall and Cooper, 1997, 1998a, 1999a, 2001a), we have identified that managers in UK businesses have experienced substantial change not only in organisational structures, but in the nature of their organisational lives. For example, in the utilities sector (gas, electricity, phone and water) in the UK, around 90% of managers reported each year that they had experienced some form of organisational change such as restructuring, downsizing, delayering, redundancy or merger. The incidence of organisational change was also found to be persistently high in the manufacturing sector, the financial services sector and the public sector (Campbell, Worrall and Cooper 2001; Worrall and Cooper, 1998b). While there is a degree of inevitability about the extent and persistence of organisational change, our research has found that the effects of change on managers in the UK have been largely negative. Our research has led us to conclude that the process of change in many organisations is not well managed. We have found that change, particularly where delayering and redundancy are used as the means of bringing about change, can be very destabilising, can create a heightened sense of job insecurity and can bring about significant changes in employee wellbeing as evidenced by changed behaviours within and outside the immediate work place (Campbell, Worrall, L. and Cooper, 2001; Worrall, Cooper, and Campbell, 2000a,b,c). It is also very clear that many organisations have tried to radically change their cost structures by transforming as much of their fixed costs as they can into variable costs. Given that the main fixed cost of many organisations is labour, there have been radical changes in the structure of employment in the UK. Many firms have