This research examines the downsizing experience of Verizon Communications Inc., undertaken in late 2003. The research will set forth the context in which this major organizational change was selected and implemented and then discuss what attributes of leadership Verizon's experience reveals about managing organizational change that is likely to have significant impact.
Over the course of 2002 and 2003, Verizon Communications Inc. engaged in a project of shedding itself of workers that it declared "surplus," chiefly by way of layoff. Some 2,000 jobs in New England were targeted, 3,800 in New York, and 1,040 in New Jersey (Verizon to Cut, 2002; Verizon Mulling, 2003). By the end of 2003, some 12,000 were set to be eliminated (Howe, 2003). Verizon Communications spokespersons attributed the cutbacks to telecom-industry downturns in investment and Verizon's enforced subsidizing of competitive common communication carriers (Verizon Mulling, 2003). Verizon's major response appears to have been to cut jobs, which the company considered "a good part of our capital program," in the words of Dennis Bone, Verizon New Jersey President, in March of 2003, in explaining a decline in the customer base for land-line installations, hence the company's capital-investment efforts (Verizon Mulling, 2003).
How well the leadership of Verizon Communications anticipated the challenge of downsizing as change can be inferred from the terms of a 2000 collective-bargaining agreement whereby "after the company declares [] jobs surplus, [labor and management] negotiate possibilities for early retirement incentives, attrition, terminating unfilled jobs and layoffs" (New England, 2002). By and large, the negotiations appear not to have resulted in the elimination of surplus workers by any method more than layoff. Whether any such negotiations were carried out in good faith is difficult to determine; however, Verizon management declared the layoffs a consequence...