Employee Engagement under Organizational Changes A Evaluation of Impact of Personnel Cost Reduction Project on Employee Engagement at Volvo Car Group

Abstract

With the development of the study on Organizational commitment, a rather new term of Employee Engagement was brought up by researchers. It has been argued that compared with committed employees, the engaged employees are the one who can really add values to the organizations. As the global economic environment is entering an era with more complex and unstable factors, it is essential to look at employee engagement from an organizational changes perspective. With the purpose to investigate how organizational changes impact on employee engagement, this research was conducted at Volvo Car Group in Gothenburg by collecting data from a survey with a sample of n=428 and semi-structured interviews. Results show that employees are still highly engaged under a personnel cost reduction situation in the company. This is argued as a result of employees’ sense-making, identification and the feeling of job security and insecurity.