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Written by Patrick Houston. Reprinted with permission of Working
Woman Magazine. Copyright Working Woman,Inc.
All across corporate America, people are keeping a shameful
little secret. After a decade of contractions in virtually every sector of the economy, a gnawing, nearly subliminal fear is
gripping people on the job, even those who have escaped the Grim Reaper of downsizing. This time they're being stalked by the
specter of job anxiety. Impalpable though it seems, its effects are real: it stifles innovation, deadens morale and decreases
productivity. And nobody wants to talk about it.
The phobia is also called job insecurity, and it may soon
reach epidemic proportions. A 1991 survey by the Philadelphia-based career consultants Right Associates found that
in 909 firms that had been through downsizing, an astonishing 70 percent of employees who still had their jobs were afraid of
losing them. The long recession has only intensified job jitters. According to another survey released last spring by Northwestern
National Life Insurance Company, 46 percent of 1,299 respondents from a variety of businesses said they feel more pressure than
ever to prove themselves to their employers. Despite indications of an economic recovery, the anxiety is so widespread that Karl
Kuhnert, a University of Georgia professor of industrial and organizational psychology who studies the phenomenon, still pegs
job insecurity as "the number one workplace issue of the 1990's."
To anyone who hasn't Rip Van Winkled her way through the
past decade, it's no surprise that employees feel so threatened. As cutbacks among even the once-immune white-collar
ranks at the most paternalistic of employers have proved, you could be out on the street through absolutely no fault of your
own. As a result, says Marilynn Williamson, executive vice president of Drake Beam Morin, the nation's biggest
career-management firm, if you're not already feeling insecure, you should be. While employers, to their credit, have
devoted increasing resources to aiding the direct victims of downsizing, they have been slow to wake up to the plight of those
left behind. "(Their attitude is), you should feel fortunate you have a job, so get with the program," says Harry
Woodward, co-author of After-Shock: Helping People Through Corporate Change.
As it turns out, those who remain suffer a constellation of
psychological consequences from having lived through a cutback. The effect even has a name: Survivor's Syndrome. Its earmarks
are guilt, anger and sadness over the loss of colleagues, as well as frustration with the injustice of it all. Most often it
manifests itself as an amorphous anxiety. One woman who lived through the corporate cutbacks at giant Seagram's Company
says she felt "like a twisted garden hose; you try to turn on the energy and enthusiasm for work, but nothing comes out.
Instead, it all just backs up on you to the point where you think you're ready to burst." (In a testament to the extent of
the paranoia that haunts the workplace, all of the people who talked about their personal experiences of job insecurity refused
to be identified.)
Unlike those of other workplace maladies, the symptoms of
job anxiety are hard to pin down and the discomfort so diffuse that it's difficult to discern even by its troubling
circumstances. Consider the woman who spent the past 19 years working for IBM. Through all those years, she received very good
performance appraisals. "There was never any doubt I would be IBM until I retired—as long as I performed," she
says.
No longer: since 1986 Big Blue has trimmed its ranks by some
60,000. She escaped the cuts but not terrible feelings of vulnerability. Her fears intensified after IBM instituted a
ranking system that compares each employee's performance with everyone else's.
"I was afraid because of my age," she says.
"I'm 45, and I don't have a college degree. I felt I would fall into that category called "unteachable" and
maybe they would want someone younger to do my job and start at a lower pay scale." Not long ago she moved from her
technician's job into an administrative post, and she continues to garner good appraisals. Nevertheless, her fears
became an emotional briefcase she toted home night after night. "I just felt like I didn't have any control over what
was happening to my future," she says.
This last admission spotlights one of the key psychological
dimensions of job insecurity. Leonard Greenhalgh, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business
Administration, says that the degree to which you feel insecure about your job exists in inverse proportion to the extent to
which you think you control your fate. And who does anymore? As the woman at IBM realized, not even a personal file filled with
positive appraisals is enough to spare you from the threat of unemployment.
Another dimension of Survivor's Syndrome is job
ambiguity. It's not just that your future is in question. Greenhalgh says that uncertainty over the nature of the job
ratchets up anxiety levels, too. Often, in the aftermath of a downsizing, employees find themselves faced with reconstituted,
mostly unfamiliar duties and no sense of mastery. They are plagued by the nagging fear of always being on the verge of
committing the snafu that will ultimately be their undoing and serve as grounds for a legitimate dismissal.
Listen, for example, to a woman who works in the highly
technical area of electronic funds transfer and corporate cash management for a big Pittsburgh-based banking corporation.
Because of the bank's troubled portfolio of real estate loans, her department is clearly understaffed. As a result, she
says she lives in constant fear that "something is going to fall through the cracks." Recently something did, and it
cost the bank $200,000. She's been in banking for nine years and, she says, "this is the first time I've gone to work
every day with knots in my stomach."
Unfortunately, when it comes to organizational change in
general, employers aren't much help in alleviating such stomach-churning uncertainty. Too often they adhere to the
so-called mushroom theory of management: Keep employees in the dark. As Greenhalgh contends, "Deprived of official sources
of information, employees must rely on rumors, which often paint a bleaker picture than is realistic."
Of course, some of the new realities of modern life have
also served to escalate on-the-job doubts, especially for women. Arthur Brief, a professor of organizational behavior at the
Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, says his studies show that feelings of job insecurity are a function of economic
dependence. "The bigger your role as a breadwinner, the more you're going to be threatened by job insecurity," he
explains. Before dismissing this as a facile statement of the obvious, though, consider the implications. The financial
security of an increasing number of American families depends on dual incomes. What's more, an increasing number of single
women are heading up their own households.
Job anxiety threatens more than the bank account. For many
employees, their work is who they are. Moreover, says Brief, "we've glorified work as the place you go to satisfy
your higher psychological needs." When a Chicago art gallery recently began cutting its staff, one employee said the cutbacks
evoked visions of the period in which she was forced to do temp work. Recalling the sense of illegitimacy she felt without a
full-time job, she says, "When I was out of work, I felt like a non-person."
Some say that job anxiety is just whining from a middle
class that has largely been sheltered from life's harshest realities. But experts say it does have a tangible impact.
"We've seen the same sort of elevated symptoms of ill health in people who are insecure on the job as in those who have
had job losses," says organizational psychologist Kuhnert. These include stress-related illnesses and higher levels of
depression. A woman who lived through a series of layoffs after Grand Metropolitan PLC acquired Pillsbury recalls that
"everybody in the office was sick." "One day at work my back spasmed out," she says, "They called the
nurse with oxygen because they thought I was having a heart attack."
Insecurity also elevates the Darwinian ethic of
self-pre-servation, always present at the workplace. "People start looking out for number one," says Richard Beyer, a
senior vice president of human resources at Boatmen's First National Bank of Kansas City, which underwent an extremely
painful merger and downsizing in the mid-1980's. An employee of a big New York bank says that when her employer recently
combined international and domestic departments as part of a downsizing, she sat through hours of meetings about who would get
what work. Even when the meetings ended, the partisan positioning didn't.
Almost nothing stifles innovation more. "To innovate
means trial and error," Says After-Shock author Woodward. "Trial and error means failing sometimes,
but employees say, "I'm not going to take a risk, because I'll get punished."
Some experts see insecurity as a tonic to the attitudes of
entitlement and complacency they feel prevail among American workers. Joel Brockner, a psychologist who teaches organizational
behavior at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, says that one downsizing organization discovered that
the relationship between job insecurity and work performance took the form of a bell curve; too little and too much fear had
adverse affects, while moderate amounts of fear resulted in peak productivity. But Brockner also notes that in that very same
sample, moderate amounts of insecurity resulted in lower levels of loyalty, and if employees are uncommitted, productivity and
quality suffer. The Pittsburgh bank employee admits that she's had to lower her standards to accommodate the increased
amount of work. She says she has submitted customer proposals that, in better times, would never have gotten out the door.
Kuhnert concludes: "Job insecurity is so devastating that even a little is no way to motivate a work
force."
So what is to be done? Above all, employers must resolve to
overcommunicate. Richard Beyer oversaw a second merger and downsizing at Boatman's in 1989 that experts cite as a case
study in how to do it right. "We did 101 things to communicate how we were going to do this," he says. The bank
conducted surveys, established a "merger hotline," published a weekly newsletter on the topic, held focus-group
meetings and formed employee transition teams, all of which served to define and address concerns among survivors.
Pacific Bell is held up as another example. It went through
a major downsizing last year, using a voluntary-retirement program that reduced its managerial ranks by 24 percent. It
offered counseling and held classes to help survivors cope. "The thing we did right was to put all the facts up front so
that employees could decide for themselves whether they had the skills to get through the future or the energy necessary to get
those skills," says Robbie Neely, Pac Bell's director of communication strategies. The company also tutored its managers
through articles in the company magazine in how to react. Among the responses it encouraged: Let employees know that what they
are feeling is normal. Pac Bell also established several task forces and networks to get people involved - what experts
describe as the best antidote of all to feelings of powerlessness.
For their part, employees almost everywhere tend to go to
great - sometimes detrimental - lengths to cope. The woman at Seagram's says she became an "efficiency goddess,"
until she realized she was becoming obsessive. In the end she decided that the best way to deal with her anxiety was not to see
her work as her life. The advice she gives to others is to start looking at themselves not as employees but as consultants whose
clients happen to be their employers. By adopting that perspective, she says, you can begin to reclaim some
psychological control.
Physical distance also helps you gain the necessary
perspective. The Pittsburgh bank employee says, "I go shopping at lunchtime to give myself a change of scene. And
sometimes, when I know that things will be really crazy at the office, I'll schedule a sales call to get out." To
achieve a degree of mental detachment, she says, she reminds herself that her job is no longer "the be-all and end-all of
my existence."
Experts approve of these tactics. The time has come when
employees no longer have the luxury of ceding career management to their employers. "You need to start developing your own
job security," advises Williamson of Drake Beam Morin. Think of yourself as a product. Develop skills and seek out experiences
that will make you more attractive not only to your present employer but to potential new ones as well.
In the end, however, the surest way for employers and
employees to cope is simply to quit denying the denial. Job anxiety is not shameful and not secret. After all, almost
everybody's got it.
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