Downsizing and an empirical study in Ankara and Denizli to find out parameters which affect the decision downsizing of executive managers

In today's modern world, because of rapidly varying environmental factors and increasing competition achieving the objectives defined by organizations and coping with the threats posed by environment and competition are getting more difficult for the organizations to overcome. In these circumstances while trying to adapt themselves to environmental factors, organizations change the form of management, of communication, of coordination and of structure in various ways. To increase the performance, efficiency, flexibility and competitiveness of organizations, downsizing which is a strategic method that includes the planned reduction of physical assets and human resources, which changes the structure of the organization, has become a widely used tool that helps to change out and improve the organizations. To avoid inefficient and poor applications of downsizing, it should be known utterly to attain the expected results and aimed objectives in efficient way. In the first section, the environmental factors, structure and design of organization are appraised because of the relation between the causes and results of downsizing. In the second section, the subject of downsizing, the causes that lead to downsizing, the objectives of downsizing and the methods of downsizing are presented with the role of human resources management in the downsizing. In the third section, determination of the parameters affecting the decisions taken by managers is assessed as a main objective and it is aimed151 to find how organizations perceive the downsizing. In this section the hypotheses postulated are tested. The results of the empirical study are cited below: - Methods of downsizing are broadly exercised by organizations. The results indicate that outsourcing is used frequently and layoff is used moderately. - Cost, quality and competence are the most important factors that affect the outsourcing. - The parameters that affect the decisions of managers are determined and it is found that economical decline, political uncertainty, unstable market have the highest influence, cost of labor, decrease in profit, high rate of interest, competitiveness, difficulty in borrowing and the loss of market share have a moderate effect among the parameters. - The results show that the decision of downsizing is made essentially by executives and owners of the organizations, the organizations do not have human resource department and during the downsizing period, managers do not pay the attention to the staff. - The result expected and obtained from the downsizing is consistent in the context of cost reduction. - In the next two years, it is obtained that, organizations would downsize by using outsourcing most frequently and by increasing the usage of others methods. All the results mentioned above are consistent with the tested hypotheses in this study.