Table 2.
Break in cooperative behavior
| Category and first-order code | Illustrative data |
|---|---|
| Break in cooperative behavior | |
| Rejection of announcement/closure and employees disengage with MNE | “It was laid out to the business very, very clearly. People were quite vocal at the announcement that, if you want this transfer to happen, and you mess us over, it will not happen.” (Respondent 16) |
| “After the dissent in the first week or two, there was a lot of tension. Fighting over the terms, an employee counsel was set up.” (Respondent 15) | |
| Statements that conveyed belief that something needed to happen quickly to re-engage staff | “One of the smartest things the Ireland management team did locally, and it is now seen as a best practice in the company, was to say, ‘Okay, over the next year, we know that you folks are being made redundant, we’re going to do everything in our power to put you in the best position possible to find employment once you leave [Gamma]’. … And the people in Ireland saw that significant investment as more goodwill if you will in making this whole transition happen as smooth as possible.” (Respondent 10) |
| “The additional follow up mechanisms happened very, very quickly in that a consultation group was formed – very, very quickly formed. How do we support our staff in terms of venturing out to this new world, and what are the things that they need to be aware of? So, for example, what support mechanisms do they need for going and looking for jobs?” (Respondent 18) | |
| Emotional barriers | |
| Anger, frustration, discontent, shock | “There was a lot of anger in the room. I mean real anger... people were just angry at being let down... I think they were just really angry at the suddenness after all they'd done and after all the programs for employee engagement. This is hypocrisy.” (Respondent 15) |
| “Some departments were shell shocked, because they thought they were completely protected... they were just caught off guard, because they thought they were in a bubble... a number of departments were caught off guard.” (Respondent 14) | |
| Mistrust, betrayal | “It had been certainly concealed from people that this [closure announcement] had obviously been in planning for quite some time, and there was a level of orchestration and polish around the delivery of the message that also didn’t appeal to people. There was a level of deceit associated with it.” (Respondent 17) |
| “For the last 20 years you have trusted them, and they have trusted you. And then you walk in one day, and your trust is broken.” (Respondent 14) | |
| Sad, upset | “I think in the [Gamma] Ireland site, most people have been there for more than 10 years. And then we probably have 20/30% of people that have been there 20 years. So, it’s been quite a traumatic thing to happen.” (Respondent 11) |
| “People were in shock. People were very upset.” (Respondent 17) | |
| Disruption to subsidiary identity | |
| Established subsidiary identity based on historical performance | “There was a sense that we've had ups and downs, we've had successes and failures where we were making pitches for projects or programs and people knew, when something was successful, they knew the effort that went into it. It wasn’t like we only knew each other for a while. We'd shared experiences of success for many, many years and some failures along the way as well. They were all shared experiences.” (Respondent 17) |
| “We took on more difficult projects, we took on projects with more dependency, we took on projects which required more finesse. And those projects came to Ireland, not because we were the cheapest, not because we were necessarily the best coders, but because we had a development system that enabled things to be done quickly, at high quality. And we were good at managing software projects and delivering software projects … we had a great software program that was built from Ireland.” (Respondent 1) | |
| Discontinuity in subsidiary identity (due to closure announcement) | “Right after that announcement, and if that’s done wrong, which it was in [Gamma], you’ve basically multiplied the difficulty [of knowledge transfer] by 10 because now you’ve lost the loyalty of the employees, you’ve lost the goodwill, it's been squandered. But local management are going to be held accountable nevertheless for delivering on that [knowledge transfer]. So they have their work, they’ve got hundreds of disaffected employees, and they have to turn around now and ask them to work professionally when they really don’t want to… There was a sense of betrayal because we made billions for this company, literally billions in margin over the 20 years. It was enormous, it was measured in the billions. They [employees] couldn’t understand why, having done everything that was asked of us, that the company was no longer fulfilling its side of the social contract.” (Respondent 16) |
| “Some people would be psychologically affected by it, that they’ve lost their workmates, their teams, their people.” (Respondent 15) |