| Summary: | The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of military deployment or activation of reserve and National Guard soldiers on civilian employers. Understanding how activation affects the operations of civilian employers will increase awareness of the effects of labor stability on organizations. The study utilizes survey methodology to measure changes in organizational output, customer satisfaction, and employee behavior. In addition, number of employees supervised, strategies employed to adapt to the effects of activation on operations, organizational types, and the amount of time required for the organization to return to pre-activation levels of performance were measured. The sample was randomly selected from the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) database in Louisiana.
The conclusion of this study is that the majority of organizations were not affected by activation. The distribution of strategies to adapt to the absence of the reserve employee was not independent from the organization type transportation and material moving. The strategy most used by respondents in the transportation and material moving sector to cope with the loss of the reserve employee was overtime, the second most used strategy was increasing employee workload without adding additional hours worked. The strategy least used by respondents in the transportation and material moving industry sector was reducing the organizations output. Finally, the strategy using contract labor was found not to be independent of the number of months required to return to a normal level of performance.
Government agencies may use the information from this research to formulate policies to counter the effects of activation on the minority of organizations affected by activation. In addition, the results from this study may enable human resource practitioners to create overtime and work load polices to counter the effects that employee absences have on organizations. The results from this study ran counter to past research on employee turnover and organizational performance, as well as recent research performed on troop activation and organizational performance. Finally, the study highlights the need for further research in the area of troop activation by exploring divergent and often conflicting views in the current literature.
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