TH E H O SP I T AL I N D U STR Y I N the United States is undergoing widespread reorganization that includes restructuring of the workforce. Surveys reveal that nurses now working in hospitals have serious concerns about the impact of such staffing changes on quality of care and the safety of patients. Media coverage of changes taking place in hospitals and hospital care echoes nurses’ warnings...

We propose a new mechanism to achieve coordination through voting, for which we discuss a number of real-life applications. Among them, the mechanism provides for a new theory for downsizing in organizations. A crisis may lead to a decrease in the willingness to cooperate in an organization, and therefore to a bad equilibrium. A consensual downsizing episode may signal credibly that survivors a...

It has become abundantly clear over the last 15 years that organizations must continually renew themselves if they are to survive and prosper. Indeed, intricacies of the renewal process as experienced by myriad organizations over this period have been repeatedly catalogued and documented.' For many organizations, renewal has involved downsizing in an effort to forestall or reverse decline. Desp...

This version of January 26, 2007. German chemical manufacturing industry experienced a major downsizing during 1992–2004. On the average, size of the firm almost halved. Using modern frontier efficiency analysis, this paper investigates technical and scale efficiency of firms. Based on reliable census data, analysis suggests that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical effic...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the factors that determine the timing of downsizing, focusing on which periods of positive profits or losses it is implemented in. We shed light on the factors concerning corporate finance, ownership structure and employer-employee attachments by employing a unique dataset. We reveal that the timing of downsizing depends on firms’ embeddeness ...

This study examined the relative effectiveness of three structural approaches to reducing team size. Seventy-one five-person teams engaged in a simulated interactive task in which the approach to downsizing was manipulated. Results suggest that the structural approaches to reducing team size differentially impact team performance, and this relationship is mediated by how and to what degree team...