한국생산성학회

In the past, the goal of achieving cost-effective survival and short-term business results were pursued. Recently, however, the issue of strengthening organizational competitiveness has become important. Many previous studies have argued that workforce restructuring negatively affects the attitudes and behaviors of employees. These studies concentrated on the direct effects of workforce restructuring and neglected to identify the mechanism by which restructuring was accomplished. Therefore, this study examines the direct effect of workforce restructuring on the affective commitment of the employees as well as investigates that perceived job insecurity has on the relationship between workforce restructuring and affective commitment. The study also empirically assesses the moderating effect of career plateau on the relationship between workforce restructuring and perception of job insecurity. For the empirical study, we conducted a self-report questionnaire survey of 422 members of big companies in Korea, the answers from which were used for data analysis. The results of the empirical analysis are as follows. First, the relationship between workforce restructuring and affective commitment was not significant. Second, perceived job insecurity mediated the relationship between workforce restructuring and affective commitment. Third, content career plateau had a negative moderating effect on the relationship between workforce restructuring and job insecurity; however, structural career plateau had no significant moderating effect. This study seeks to extend and augment workforce restructuring and career plateau related studies by exploring the mediating variable(job insecurity perception) and moderating variable(career plateau) on the relationship between workforce restructuring and outcomes. In practice, workforce restructuring is an opportunity to strengthen organizational capacity and provide sound tension to the organization when it is flexibly applied considering management circumstances. Organizations need to manage the process of making changes in management to resolve job insecurity during the restructuring precess, and also address the issue of career plateau in relation to employees. Finally, the limitations of this research and future directions for further studies were outlined based on the empirical results.