Chapter 9: Organizational Cynicism: A Field Examination Using Global and Local Social Exchange Relationships and Workplace Outcomes

The last two decades have ushered in a dramatic change in the notion of employee-organization relationships (Kissler, 1994; Tsui & Wu, 2005). Rampant mergers, acquisitions, corporate scandals, off-shoring of jobs, reengineering, and downsizing programs have flooded corporate life— resulting in mass layoffs, euphemistically labeled “rightsizings,” and organizational restructurings which have left many employee-critics in their wake (Vogl, 1995). Increased turbulence in organizational life has created a multitude of organizational initiatives and a veritable “alphabet soup” of acronyms.

Frequent change that has not delivered in terms of outcomes has many employees noting inconsistencies between what management says and what it does. Hackneyed corporate values’ statements that look good on a wall such as, “Our employees are our most important resource” often seem inconsistent with organization actions in practice (Stewart, 1996). For example, senior managers and corporate boards tell the workforce about the importance of cutting costs and freezing employee salaries while they earn multimillion-dollar bonuses. Teams are proclaimed by senior staff as the “new way to work,” but organizational appraisal systems reward individual efforts in practice. Thus, many organizations send inconsistent or mixed messages to their workforce (Tsui & Wu, 2005). As a result, many employees have begun to reexamine corporate life and the worth of corporate loyalty. For many employees the cartoon strip character Dilbert has become a hero, symbolizing the frustrations and complexities of work life that have resulted from many of the above changes.