Layoff and COVID-19; Layoff decision consequences in the wake of COVID-19

COVID-19 Research Area(s): Economics & Business

We want to evaluate the managers layoff decision process in the wake of covid-19 and the effects of these decisions on laid off and survived employees. This is an exploratory research. We don't have predefined hypotheses. We want to see how managers decide who should be laid off during the unusual circumstances due to COVID-19. Do they make decision based on employee competencies or based on their personal trust/similarity/biases? Also, we want to see how employees (whether laid off or survived) react differently to these different decision making processes. We are interested in employee reactions in terms of their feelings, attitude to the job and organization, and future job seeking behaviours. We have connected with three auto dealerships that went through extensive layoffs. We want to interview and collect survey from managers and sales people who were laid off or survived the lay off. Our method will be a combination of a series of qualitative interviews and simple surveys to measure participants' personality traits.