Communication, Procedural Justice & Employee Adjustment During Change: A Longitudinal Investigation

The current study investigates the importance of different forms of communication before and after the completion of a major multinational acquisition in predicting survivor adjustment following subsequent downsizing. In addition, we examine the role that procedural justice perceptions have in mediating relationships between voice provision during acquisition, information sharing (before and immediately after acquisition) with four key indicators of adjustment (job satisfaction, job-related strain, organizational identification, and intention to quit). Testing for indirect mediation, we show, with a bootstrapped sample of 155 employees (tracked across 12 months from The Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK), that the provision of voice opportunities during the acquisition has a positive long-term impact on all employee adjustment indices; importantly the analysis indicates that this “voice effect” on survivor adjustment occurs through the impact that voice provision has on perceptions of procedural justice imm...