Why Does a Reorg Feel Threatening Even When Your Job Is Safe?

At Thursday's all-hands the new org chart goes up, and the first line under it says no roles are affected. Your manager changes, your team is split across two new units, the timeline is "over the coming months," a steering group decided, and the criteria were "strategic." Your job is safe, and the afternoon's work does not get done.

A reorg feels threatening because social conditions start the body's threat response. Being judged with no control over the outcome produces the largest stress responses measured (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004), uncertainty about an outcome raises stress on its own (de Berker and colleagues, 2016), and a reorg changes standing, timelines, control, teams and process at once.

What Does a Reorg Change besides Jobs?

"Your manager changes" changes who judges your work and your standing. "Over the coming months" removes predictability. "The steering group decided" removes control. "Your team is split" changes who you belong with. "The criteria were strategic" leaves the fairness of the process open. Being judged and lacking control are the two features behind the largest laboratory stress responses (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004), set out in What Does Fight or Flight Mean at Work?, and they start the second-by-second response described in What Happens in Your Body When Someone Says We Need to Talk?.

David Rock's SCARF model, a framework from practice that cites research without adding data of its own, gives the five conditions the names status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness (Rock, 2008).

Why Does a Change in Standing Feel like a Threat?

Caroline Zink and colleagues scanned people playing a game alongside simulated players shown as higher or lower ranked, in three experiments of 24 participants each, with the other player's rank irrelevant to the task and to the reward. Seeing a higher-ranked player engaged attention and cognitive systems, notably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and when the hierarchy was unstable, further regions were engaged, including the right amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (Zink, Tong, Chen, Bassett, Stein and Meyer-Lindenberg, 2008). A reorg produces that unstable hierarchy, since the new manager has not yet judged your work and the new peers do not know your record. The same condition is part of why feedback feels like an attack even when it is good.

Why Does "Over the Coming Months" Raise Anxiety?

Archy de Berker and colleagues had 45 people predict whether a rock hid a snake, with a snake meaning an electric shock, while the odds shifted between blocks. Subjective stress, skin conductance and, in a subset of 22, pupil diameter all tracked how uncertain the outcome was, highest when the chance of a shock was about even and lower when the outcome was more predictable in either direction (de Berker, Rutledge, Mathys, Marshall, Cross, Dolan and Bestmann, 2016). Grillon's group recorded higher background startle when a stimulus's timing carried no cue (Grillon, Baas, Lissek, Smith and Milstein, 2004), the finding set out in Why Is Waiting for News Worse than Getting Bad News?.

Prashant Bordia and colleagues surveyed a public sector organization during change and separated three kinds of uncertainty, about strategy, about structure, and about one's own job. Feelings of control mediated the link between job-related uncertainty and psychological strain, management communication was associated with less strategic uncertainty, and participation in decisions was associated with less structural and job-related uncertainty and with more control (Bordia, Hobman, Jones, Gallois and Callan, 2004). "Over the coming months" is a timeline with no signal of when the next decision arrives, and a dated sequence of decisions converts it into a signaled one; the step from the laboratory to the timeline is an application.

Why Does Control over the Outcome Matter?

Robert Karasek's analysis of national survey data from Sweden and the United States found that mental strain came from the combination of heavy job demands with low decision latitude, the worker's control over how the work is done (Karasek, 1979); the samples were employed men. In the Whitehall II cohort of 10,308 British civil servants followed for a mean of 5.3 years, men and women with low job control, whether self-reported or independently assessed, had a higher risk of newly reported coronary heart disease, with an odds ratio of 1.93 for those low in control on both measurement occasions compared with those high on both, and the association was not explained by employment grade or by the classic risk factors (Bosma, Marmot, Hemingway, Nicholson, Brunner and Stansfeld, 1997). A review by Lauren Leotti and colleagues argues that the need for control is biologically motivated, that the absence of control is aversive, and proposes a corticostriatal network as the substrate (Leotti, Iyengar and Ochsner, 2010). Lost control is part of why being told what to do makes people resist.

Why Does Splitting the Team Hurt?

Henri Tajfel and colleagues assigned people to groups on a trivial, arbitrary criterion and then had them distribute real rewards and penalties. People favored their own group even though nothing but the classification distinguished the groups, the design excluded self-interest and any prior hostility, and in a second series people pursued the largest difference between the groups at a cost to their own objective gains (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament, 1971). A line on an org chart is a classification of this kind. The two halves of the old team become an in-group and an out-group, which is part of why teams split into us and them so quickly. In Eisenberger's imaging study, exclusion raised activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region that also carries the distress of physical pain (Eisenberger, Lieberman and Williams, 2003).

In Sigal Barsade's laboratory study of groups making a managerial decision, a trained confederate's mood spread to the other members, as rated by outside coders and by the members themselves, and groups whose confederate showed a positive mood cooperated more and reported less conflict (Barsade, 2002). The anxiety one person brings from the all-hands into the new team is contagious in the same way, which is part of why one person's mood spreads through a whole meeting, and the same mechanism spreads a calm leader's state.

Why Does an Unfair Process Feel Physically Wrong?

In the ultimatum game, one player proposes a split of a sum and the other accepts or rejects it; a rejection leaves both with nothing. Alan Sanfey and colleagues scanned the responders and found that unfair offers produced activity in the anterior insula and in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the insula response was higher for the unfair offers people went on to reject (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom and Cohen, 2003). So the insula response accompanied a choice to give up money. A reorg whose criteria are not stated, or whose process is described only as "strategic," cannot be judged fair or unfair by the people it moves, and the insula finding is part of why unfairness feels physically wrong.

Why Does Trust Change How People Judge the Announcement?

Roger Mayer, James Davis and David Schoorman define trust as the willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions, based on the expectation that the other will do something important to you, whether or not you can monitor them, and they identify three characteristics that make a person trustworthy, ability, benevolence and integrity (Mayer, Davis and Schoorman, 1995). A reorg announcement is one of the actions by which the people being moved assess a leader's ability, benevolence and integrity, the components of what builds trust in a team.

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as people's perception of how much interpersonal threat their group holds, a tacit assessment of whether others will give them "the benefit of the doubt," and treats it as a property of the team, separate from trust between two parties (Edmondson, 2004), which is the difference between trust and psychological safety. Her 51-team study found more learning behavior in teams with that perception (Edmondson, 1999), the finding behind Why Do Some Teams Speak Up and Others Stay Silent?. A new team has no history to show whether speaking up is safe, and a leader who says what is not yet decided supplies the first evidence.

Does a Reorg Harm People Who Keep Their Jobs?

In a meta-analysis of job insecurity studies, which measure the perceived threat to a job, Magnus Sverke and colleagues found detrimental consequences for job attitudes, organizational attitudes and health, and to some extent for behavior toward the organization (Sverke, Hellgren and Näswall, 2002). By that definition, the conditions above count as a threat to the job for people whose roles are untouched. Alannah Rafferty and Mark Griffin proposed that the frequency, impact and planning of change shape the uncertainty people felt about it and, through that uncertainty, their job satisfaction and intention to leave, with the three characteristics showing different relationships to the outcomes (Rafferty and Griffin, 2006). And among people who survive a layoff, Joel Brockner and colleagues found self-reported work effort highest at moderate job insecurity and lower at both extremes, an inverted-U pattern strongest among survivors with a high economic need to work (Brockner, Grover, Reed and DeWitt, 1992), which is part of why the people who survive layoffs struggle too.

What Does the SCARF Model Get Right, and What Does It Leave Out?

The five conditions are social and each has evidence behind it, and the quality of that evidence varies. The status finding comes from imaging experiments with simulated players, and the fairness finding from an imaging study of money splits; the certainty finding from a shock task; the control findings from large surveys and one prospective cohort with health outcomes; the relatedness findings from reward allocations and a laboratory confederate. None of these studied a reorganization, and the step from each paradigm to an org chart is an application. The model's claim that the brain treats these conditions as it treats physical threats is supported in one specific sense, the finding above that the stress systems respond to them. The research does not show that the brain cannot tell a social threat from a physical one. The model also gives no weights. Nothing in the research says which of the five matters most, and Brockner's economic-need result suggests the answer depends on what each person risks losing. A new system adds novelty to these conditions, the combination behind Why Does New Software at Work Feel Like a Threat?, and Why Is Change at Work So Hard? counts standing and control among its three causes.

What the SCARF Model Is

SCARF model: a practitioner framework by David Rock that names five social conditions whose loss people at work react to as a threat, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness, and proposes that a threat to any of them engages the same response as a physical threat (Rock, 2008). It was published without original data; each condition has its own peer-reviewed studies, with the strengths and limits described above.

What Can an Announcement Do about Each Condition?

Standing. Say what each person keeps, by name where the group is small enough, and who will assess their work from the first day of the new chart.

Certainty. Replace "over the coming months" with dates, including the date of the next decision and what will be decided then.

Control. Name the decisions that remain with the people being moved, and the point at which their input changes something.

Belonging. Keep working pairs and small groups intact where the structure allows it, and where it does not, name the new team and give it a first task together.

Fairness. Describe the process and the criteria, including who decided and what they weighed, before anyone asks.

Before the next announcement you are part of, write the five lines above for it, and for any line you cannot yet fill in, say so and give the date on which you can.

FAQ

Why does a reorg feel threatening even if my job is safe?

Because social conditions start the stress response, with or without a job at risk. An audience that judges you plus a result you cannot alter produced the largest cortisol rises across 208 laboratory studies (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004), the brain tracks rank even when it is irrelevant to the task (Zink and colleagues, 2008), and a reorg changes who judges you, what you control, who you belong with, and when you will know.

What is the SCARF model?

A practitioner framework by David Rock that names five social conditions whose loss people at work react to as a threat, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness (Rock, 2008). The model proposes that a threat to any of the five engages the same response as a physical threat, and it was published as a synthesis of other people's research. A reorg touches all five in one announcement.

Why does not knowing the timeline make a reorg worse?

Because uncertainty raises stress on its own. In a shock-prediction task with 45 people, stress ratings and skin conductance were highest when the chance of a shock was about even and lower when the outcome was more predictable in either direction (de Berker and colleagues, 2016). "Over the coming months" gives no signal of when the next decision comes, which is Grillon's unsignaled condition as an application (Grillon and colleagues, 2004), and dates make it the signaled one.

Does a reorg affect people who keep their jobs?

Yes. Job insecurity, the perceived threat to a job, has detrimental consequences for job attitudes, organizational attitudes and health in a meta-analysis of the research (Sverke, Hellgren and Näswall, 2002), and the conditions a reorg changes raise that perception whether or not a role is cut, as an application of the research above. Among layoff survivors, self-reported work effort followed an inverted U against job insecurity (Brockner and colleagues, 1992).

Why does losing control at work feel so bad?

Because low control predicts strain and illness in the workplace research. Mental strain came from heavy demands combined with low decision latitude in national survey data (Karasek, 1979), and in 10,308 civil servants followed for about five years, low job control predicted a higher risk of newly reported coronary heart disease (Bosma and colleagues, 1997). A reorg decided elsewhere removes control from everyone it moves.

What is the difference between trust and psychological safety?

Trust concerns another party and psychological safety concerns the group. Mayer, Davis and Schoorman define trust as the willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions, built on their ability, benevolence and integrity (Mayer, Davis and Schoorman, 1995). Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as people's perception of how much interpersonal threat their group holds, whether others will give them "the benefit of the doubt," and treats it as a property of the team (Edmondson, 2004).

Is the SCARF model scientifically proven?

Not as a model. It has no original data behind it (Rock, 2008). Each of the five conditions has peer-reviewed evidence of varying strength, from small imaging studies of rank (Zink and colleagues, 2008) and fairness (Sanfey and colleagues, 2003) to a prospective cohort on job control (Bosma and colleagues, 1997). None of those studies tested a reorganization, and the model gives no weights.

What should a leader say when announcing a reorg?

What each person keeps and who will assess their work, the dates of the next decisions, the decisions that remain with the people being moved, the new teams by name, and the process and criteria behind the decision. Participation in decisions was associated with less structural and job-related uncertainty and with more control during organizational change (Bordia and colleagues, 2004), and stating the criteria lets people judge the process at all.

If you're leading a change and want people to keep speaking up while it happens, The DANCE System gives you 29 tools for planning what to communicate at each phase.

Related Posts:

What Does Fight or Flight Mean at Work?

Why Is Change at Work So Hard?