Implications of Downsizing

Implications of Downsizing

Implications of Downsizing – Final Paper

Business 640

Toni L. Wolf

August 17, 2009

Dr. Robert DeYoung

Implications of Downsizing

Thesis Statement

During the past decade, American companies have been downsized, right-sized, reorganized, and globalized in a quest to become more competitive and, ultimately, more successful. Of course, in the past year and a half, the employment scene has been worse with over half a million people unemployed because of the current recession. As a result, human resources – what used to be called personnel back in the day – is fast gaining favor as the key to helping organizations deal with a rapidly changing competitive landscape and growing demands to better serve customers, to better differentiate from competitors, and to better deliver value to the bottom line.

Implications of Downsizing

Human Resources (HR), as a strategic business function, is an essential part of maximizing return on shareholder value. HR is an integrated and valued member of the management team. This is HR as an integrated and valued member of the management team. That HR should ascend to such a role of prominence in an organization should not be too surprising. After all, a company’s only real, sustainable, competitive advantage is its human capital – the collective capabilities of its work force. Anything else – products, service, processing, and facilities – can be copied; people cannot.

The changing role of HR has tremendous implications not just for business. Further, it has a huge involvement in terms of not just employees, but also the survivors in a company, families of the employees, and the communities wherever companies exist as well as how they affect different populations that they touch. It comes down to having the right people doing the right things to drive the organization performance – and HR is key to making this happen.

Consequently, people-related activities where HR...