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What is meant by the concept of “survivor syndrome”? To what extent, and in what ways, can managers reduce the problems of survivor syndrome during and after redundancies?

Survivor syndrome is a phenomenon happen when a company is undergoing retrenchment exercise in the organization, cutting down or dismissing part of the workforce, causing uneasy feeling and anxiety among those survivors. For example, it is human nature to feel anxious, uncertain if he will be the next target for retrenchment in a bad economy, after seeing many of his previous work partners or friends in the workplace being dismissed or retrenched (Dessler, 2011). He may suffer survivor syndrome, whereby he will tend to feel distressed, depressed and insecure. This is natural as people will see that ongoing retrenchment exercise on a mass scale as a threat to him. As a consequence, people, namely those survivors may feel badly about the organization, and to some extent may be angry about the policies and the fact that organization does not want to stay together with them in hard times. The survivors may perceive the management badly as well. They may think that managers is treating them unfairly, or perhaps is not ethical. Ultimately, all these feelings will affect the employees’ motivation, commitment and passion in working in an organization (Price, 2007).

To handle the issues, it is important for manager to implement strategies that able to reduce or mitigate the survivor syndrome among the workforce during and after the retrenchment exercise. Firstly, the manager can adopt a fair, open and transparent approach in handling redundancies. This will prevent the workforce in engaging in unproductive and stressing guess works that will cause them to lost motivation and commitment to work in the organization. Transparency is crucial, as people must be informed that everything is fair, proper and necessary. Besides, communication with the workforce is crucial as well. Communication should be two-ways, understanding, proactive and clear. Doubts of employees must be cleared, considered seriously so that comprehensive pictures of employees’ feelings are captured. It is also crucial to understand that employees’ participation in the exercise, and to deal with the feelings of anxiety should be encouraged. By helping the employees to face with the feelings proactively, they can be more easily to deal with the hard feeling of losing their previous work partners, and become more able to cope with the stresses due to challenging economic climate and organization performance. Thus, more efforts can be channeled to productive works, instead of keep worrying and being stressful in handling daily tasks at workplace.

References:

Gilmore, S., & Williams. S. (2009), Human Resource Management, New York, OUP.

Dessler, G. (2011) Human Resource Management ,12^th edition, Prentice Hall.

Price, A. (2007). Human Resource Management, (3d edn). Thomson Learning.