Organizational Change and Corporate Sustainability in an Economic Crisis: Evidence from Slovenia

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the link between perceived levels of organizational process changes, vis-à-vis selected organization-to-employee relationship dimensions based on the Hackman and Oldham (1975) Job diagnostic survey and marketing performance measures. We follow Pettigrew, Woodman and Cameron (2001) in their call for a deeper understanding of the link between the various elements of the organizational change process itself, and organizational performance outcomes. Our analysis is based on data from over 220 organizations, and over 22,800 of their employees in Slovenia between 2008 and 2010. Our analysis shows that the perceived levels of organizational change (OC) are the highest for marketing and HRM processes, relative to other organizational processes. Furthermore, we establish that a higher organization-to-employee relationship quality is in myriad ways linked to higher perceived levels of OC in HRM processes. However, this is true only for the initial phase of the current economic crisis (2008 and 2009), but not also for its subsequent widening (2010). On the other hand, the correlation comparison between selected marketing performance measures and perceived level of OC in marketing processes is also significantly linked also to customer loyalty. Lastly, by analyzing the correlations between perceived levels OC and corporate sustainability (as added value per employee) we can see that perceived levels of OC in marketing and production processes display high correlations in the beginning of the economic crisis (2008), but not afterward (2009 or 2010). In addition, perceived levels of OC related to HRM do not correlate with added value per employee in any of the three compared years. This shows a different nature of the relationship between specific areas of perceived OC and corporate sustainability, as measured by added value per employee.