The differential impact of organizational restructuring and downsizing on the psychosocial work environment and safety climate in the petroleum industry

Mathisen, G.E. and Tjora, T. and Bergh, L.I.V. and Jain, A. and Leka, S. (2023) The differential impact of organizational restructuring and downsizing on the psychosocial work environment and safety climate in the petroleum industry. Safety Science, 166. ISSN 0925-7535

Abstract

This study examines trends in employee perceptions of psychosocial risk and safety climate during organizational change in the Norwegian petroleum industry between 2007 and 2019. Using data from the RNNP survey, which is distributed to personnel on offshore facilities on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and onshore installations biennially, a repeated measures analysis was conducted to identify trends in psychosocial risk and safety climate perceptions. Results indicated that while safety climate was perceived to improve significantly from 2009 to 2019, those participants who had experienced organizational downsizing, organizational restructuring, or both downsizing and restructuring reported a significantly lower safety climate on most waves included in the analysis. While those participants that had experienced downsizing reported a significantly lower quality psychosocial work environment across waves, it was organizational restructuring that was associated with the largest perceived decline in the quality of the psychosocial work environment and not downsizing. The combination of restructuring and downsizing was significantly associated with a lower quality psychosocial work environment across all waves but to a lesser extent than for safety climate. Our study highlights that different types of organizational change – restructuring and downsizing, have a differential impact on the perception of different types of risk – psychosocial risk and safety climate. It further demonstrates the long-term detrimental effect of large-scale resource cuts, particularly those that culminated in 2017 in the Norwegian Petroleum industry, demonstrated as an erosion in the perception of the quality of both safety climate and the psychosocial work environment.