That said, it would still be appropriate given the inconclusive nature of the present section of findings to recommend a study which distills the connection between procedural justice and the general perception of redundancy survivors of broader organisational justice. Interactional Justice:

The findings in this section would also be somewhat inconclusive. In this section, researchers would seek to establish a connection between employee perceptions of broader organisational justice and the justice shown to remaining members of the organisation through redundancy procedures. For survivors, that is, there is an interest in measuring the relationship with the company based on the treatment which its exhibits toward surviros as they weather the uncertainty of downsizing, responsibility shifting and resource redistribution. In all of such cases, it was anticipated that personnel would overwhelmingly based their view of organisational on these features of interactional justice that include assurance of job security, practical support for new job responsibilities and appropriate compensation for increased demands. This anticipation would be met with a challenge. According to the data collected, out of the 125 respondents questioned, 50 agreed that organizational procedures had been carried out in a manner which treated survivors fairly. 43 did not feel that remaining personnel had been treated fairly following redundancies and 33 did not express any position at all. Once again, researchers are justified in arguing that the findings here are inconclusive and that universal observation cannot be drawn from these data. In addition to recommending as with the above dimensions of organisational justice that more focused studies be conducted in order to produced more conclusive findings, it is recommended that perhaps the instrument used to measure these different dimensions of organisational justice be refined. Particularly, each of the three dimensions of organisational justice discussed here above is given over to statistically significant numbers of abstentions. The uncertainty of many respondents may suggest a lack of clarity or refinement in the survey instrument itself. And once again, the lack of conclusiveness here justifies the isolation of each of these dimensions in the context of its own study on perceptions of organisational justice amongst survivors of redundancies.

Organisational Commitment:

A primary concern entering the discussion on organizational commitment subsequent to redundancies is the idea that such downsizing is done for the purposes of efficiency. It was anticipated that the approach taken by many firms towards eliminating redundancy does not necessarily imply an improvement in organizational efficiency. To the contrary, the elimination of personnel may carry with it a number of consequences to the culture, delegation and morale experienced by those who remain behind to the extent that organizational commitment may be damaged. As shown in the section above, it is unclear how much the manner in which redundancies are addressed will actually impact survivor perceptions of organisational justice. But it is still predicted that organisational commitment may suffer during this process. The text by Streeter helps the present research to make this case, indicating that many organisational theorists are reconsidering the implications of redundancy-based downsizing. Accordingly, Streeter provides the research with the assertion that "the great concern for eliminating duplication and overlap within and between organizations has led to disregard for the benefits that accompany redundancy. For example, W. Richard Scott notes that duplication serves...

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A forced removal of these safeguards can increase the strain felt by those who remain in place and can simultaneously produce a sense of insecurity for those who may now struggle to complete their responsibilities or fulfill expanded roles. Often, the elimination of redundancy will foist greater pressures or higher job expectations upon individual employees. This will occur both at the expense of these expectations and the feeling of confidence and accountability felt by the individual employee. By assigning fewer individuals, agencies or task agendas to a single organisational problem, it is often the case that the organization will place greater strain upon those left behind as they attempt to maintain the same standards of quality and proficiency as existed prior to downsizing. This can be devastating to organisational commitment, which is measured here in the three dimensions of affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment.

Where affective commitment is concerned, the presumption above is confirmed. Here, the feeling among employees that the company has or has not kept all of its promised to personnel during the redundancy process is shown to have a direct impact on the sense of organisational commitment for survivors. Accordingly, the mean score in a t-test measuring affective commitment would shift significantly from 7.3569 before redundancies to a present score of 3.9642. This would represent the most significant shift in commitment, indicating that it is perhaps most important to personnel going through redundancies to know that promised made by the organisation will be kept.

Another interesting finding indicates that continuance commitment and normative commitment actually increased following redundancies. These both diverge from correlated hypotheses and suggest that to an extent, as employees remain behind and return to a sense of normalcy within the organization, commitment once again returns to a higher level. This indicates that companies desiring to improve the morale and commitment of personnel left behind following redundancies are best served by pursuing continuance commitment and normative commitment from survivors.

Ultimately, we are inclined to confirm the expectation that there is a direct relationship between employee perceptions of organisational justice and both short- and long-term organisational commitment following redundancies. Accordingly, research would show strong support for the hypotheses indicating that positive distributive, procedural and interactional justice all correlate strongly to affective commitment. However, beyond this, there is an inconsistency in the correlations drawn between the variant of dimensions of both justice and commitment. This inclines researchers to reflect on the shortcomings in the research process as concerns the yielding of data on perceptions of organisational justice. Such is to say that the inability to yield conclusive data on survivor perceptions following redundancies on the various dimensions of organisational justice makes it difficult to subsequently draw confident conclusions regarding the correlation of these dimensions to organizational commitment. The wide net cast by the present research helps to initiate a discussion on this subject but further and more focused research is most surely justified by the findings and analysis conducted in the present section.

Works Cited:

Streeter, C.L. (1992). Redundancy in Organizational Systems. Social Service Review, 66(1), 97-111.