A study on motivating employees’ learning commitment in the post-downsizing era: Job satisfaction perspective

From the resource-based perspective, organization learning is the foundation of firms creating their special resources and thereby increasing their competitive advantage. Organization learning is indeed derived from individual learning within the organization. However, many firms have adopted downsizing strategies to reduce the redundancy. Nevertheless, it had a great impact both on laid-off employees and remaining ones. The remaining employees lost their trust, loyalty toward the firm and eventually left. The consequence not only affected the firms’ daily operation but also impacted employees’ learning motivation for improving their ability to enhance the firm's competitive advantage. In the post-downsizing era, applying appropriate human resource management practices to motivate employees would be a critical issue. The study began with two psychological constructs: job satisfaction and learning commitment to explore the content of job satisfaction which significantly influenced remaining employees’ learning commitment. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze the data. The results revealed that the two criterion in job satisfaction “the relationship with colleagues” and “the relationship with the family” significantly influenced employees’ learning commitment. However, this was clearly different from managers’ subjective expectation. The findings provide important implications for both the research field and practical management of downsizing, employee motivation, cross-culture management and strategic HRM practices.