A changing American workplace means pain for survivors on both sides of the desk.

The news blared from every media outlet worthy of the name: in 1994, the most productive workers on the planet hailed from the good old U.S. of A. The proof: all the leading economic indicators showed new high-water marks in American employment and productivity, while inflation was tied to a rope.

So after a scare by those pesky Japanese, all is finally rosy in the land of mass worship of the GDP, right?

Hardly, says the man or woman in the street. They say the cheerleading by Wall Street moguls masks a load of ills about America's economy, not the least of which is a growing, grassroots angst among rank-and-file workers. But if more people are drawing paychecks and turning out more widgits these days, why all the worry? No fashionable economic indicator will ever reveal the American workplace as it really is, say some experts.

"It really is bad out there," says Dr. Pamela Perrewe, chair of FSU's management department in the university's College of Business. "It's not quite as traumatic as the '30s, but it's real bad. Today, (one of the main concerns is that) there are no safety nets. There once was an implicit tenure for employees in business organizations. That's gone."

When she came to Florida State 12 years ago, Perrewe had no inkling that her research interests would place her smack in the middle of the greatest upheaval of the American workplace since the Great Depression. This fall, she finished editing her latest work on the subject, Occupational Stress: A Handbook, a collection of articles she describes as both "theoretical and empirical," published by Taylor Francis Publishing in New York.

Perrewe (Ph.D. Nebraska) studies what she calls the psychology of people at work-an interest that dates back to her doctoral student days, when she researched employee stress and working conditions in a nuclear power plant. Since then, she's focused on stress in the workplace, how it affects perception and productivity, and how it can be minimized both for managers and their employees.

In the 1990s, of course, the mother of all stressors for American workers has been the ever-present specter of job elimination, the phenomenon that brings a special relevance to Perrewe's findings. Between January 1991 and December 1993, some 4.5 million American workers lost jobs they had held more than three years, according to a survey released this fall by the U.S. Department of Labor. The carnage was nothing if not democratic, cutting equally across occupations, employment levels and geographic regions. If anything, in fact, the ax fell heaviest among the better-paid.

Of the 4.5 million workers who became emotional and financial casualties of the new, fiercely competitive global economy, more than 1.2 million were managers and professionals. Another 1.3 million were technicians, salespeople and clerical workers. Not only did not carrying a lunch bucket cease to be a guarantee of a stable career in the early 1990s, it made the possibility proportionately more dicey. Relative to their representation in the corporate work force, managers and supervisors were almost twice as likely to get axed.

The layoffs have hardly abated since the Labor Department survey was finished in 1993-they've simply shifted from manufacturing sectors to industries like telecommunications and financial services. Indeed, layoffs appear to have become business as usual in the '90s, geared no longer to economic downturns but instead to technology-driven structural changes in corporate employment needs.

Only six percent of the corporations responding to a recent survey of corporate employment trends by the American Management Association cited an anticipated business downturn as the sole reason for job elimination. And though net job losses at the AMA's 1,003 member corporations declined from eight percent in 1991 to one percent last year, the number of companies that continued to eliminate jobs was 50 percent-the highest percentagein four years-as upper management continued to lop managers and add various kinds of technical positions.

"There is a strong indication that newly created jobs require less supervisory and managerial expertise, but a new range of skill sets with heavy emphasis on technological know-how," says Eric Rolfe Greenberg, the AMA's director of management studies.

Lately Perrewe has broadened her scope to include the international arena, an outgrowth of a study by an Israeli colleague that suggested some major differences between the U.S. and Israeli workplaces. The Israeli study found that people working under stressful conditions were evaluated less favorably than were U.S. workers. American managers seemed more willing to acknowledge difficult working conditions and adjust their evaluations more favorably.

"We can't quite figure out why this is," Perrewe says. "The woman from Israel and I have corresponded about this for years. We've done two or three data collections on it. These cultural differences prompted us to embark on an international stress study. Right now, we have seven countries participating in the examination of cultural effects on stress and choice of coping mechanisms."

She adds: "Much of the research on stress in the workplace has been done in the U.S. We're really concerned about our Western bias in the research and generalizing it all over the world. I don't know if we should be doing that. What we may find stressful, other cultures may find useful as a coping mechanism."

In assessing the impact of downsizing and it sister phenomenon "re-engineering," Perrewe has focused on corporate aftershocks. While much media attention-deservedly-has been given to layoff victims, Perrewe has tended to zero in on the management challenges presented after the ax: what to do with and how to treat the employees who remain.

"You may be keeping your best people, but your best people are also your most mobile people," Perrewe says. "If they're nervous about keeping their jobs, they may be leaping out of there. You want to keep those people happy."

In After the Layoff: Closing the Barn Door Before All the Horses Are Gone (Business Horizons, 1993), Perrewe and co-author Robert C. Ford argued convincingly that, initially, how laid-off employees are treated will have a major bearing on an organization's ability to keep surviving employees in the fold.

Perrewe and Ford recommend anticipating thorny issues like salary determination before the ax falls; communicating frequently, fully and openly; giving both laid-off and surviving employees the straight dope about job eliminations; sharing the pain by spreading layoffs across hierarchical levels; showing compassion both to those departing and those remaining; empowering surviving employees by giving them more control over their work; and encouraging genuine employee participation in decision-making.

Though these admonitions might seem common-sensical and self-evident, statistical evidence suggests otherwise. In the Department of Labor study, for example, an astounding 42 percent of the 4.5 million laid-off employees received no written notification of their dismissal. Perrewe's anecdotal information tends to support the Labor report's dismal findings. She tells of a colleague in the Midwest who was told his services as a consultant would no longer be needed because his company was planning massive layoffs. The colleague assumed those layoffs would be carefully planned and executed over a reasonable period of time. Instead they were announced without notice, with the axed's names read over the company's intercom system.

"I'm convinced that there is a direct correlation between this kind of insensitivity and the rising incidence of violence in the work place," Perrewe says. "Many people are very ego-involved with their jobs. To take that away from them is to take away their identity. And doing it insensitively pushes some past their limits."

After the layoffs-even if they have been handled sensitively and compassionately-management faces a subtler but equally daunting challenge: motivating workers whose careers have plateaued. So-called re-engineered organizations, with their emphasis on more technical know-how and less supervision, often find themselves with legions of employees with nothing in particular to look forward to. The flatter corporate structures of re-engineered corporations offers few internal opportunities for advancement.

To find out more about the ramifications of career plateauing and explore possible solutions, Perrewe recently made an interesting offer to the hundreds of companies that receive her college's Center for Human Resources Management newsletter. The center offered consulting expertise at no charge to companies that suspected that career plateauing might be causing morale and productivity problems. The center offered to conduct intensive employee interviews and help determine what management strategies might be employed to reduce career-plateau-induced stress. A Florida engineering firm took the center up on its offer and in the process became the subject of a dissertation by Dr. Denise Fernandez, at the time a doctoral student advised by Perrewe and now an instructor at a college in Kentucky.

Fernandez' study confirmed that career plateauing was indeed a widespread phenomenon in the firm, creating morale problems that affected company productivity. Of the 225 professionals surveyed for the study-whose average age was 42-almost half reported being distressed by the sense that their careers had plateaued. Among the negative coping mechanisms these employees adopted were a propensity to blame the company or a supervisor for the situation, or to resort to the abuse of alcohol and drugs. Not surprisingly, many reported that feelings of being trapped in their current positions affected their work, though most said the quantity of their output suffered rather than the quality.

Those results confirmed Perrewe's suspicions about the problem's magnitude. But the study revealed some startling information about the ineffectiveness of conventional management strategies to raise employee morale when employees feel trapped at their current level of employment.

"We found that strategies that work beautifully to reduce the stress levels of employees who don't feel plateaued were completely counterproductive for career-plateaued people," Perrewe says. "For example, it's normally a good idea to encourage employees to form support groups to help them iron out solutions to work-related problems. That can be very empowering. And lateral transfers can be very effective for people beginning to feel a job is getting stale.

"But with these plateaued employees, those strategies just seemed to make things worse. The support groups turned into giant, formalized versions of gripe sessions around the coffee pot. That just elevated everybody's level of frustration. And lateral transfers just seemed to make plateaued employees mad. They think, 'Here I am in this new position, and I'm still going nowhere.'"

What does seem to help, Perrewe says, is encouraging employees to organize as teams to accomplish specific goals and to assign employees special projects. Though the downsizing and restructuring of the '90s has exacted a huge toll in employee loyalty, most people still want to take pride in their work. Changing employees' responsibilities without formally making or labeling the change a transfer appears to work.

Another strategy management might consider is encouraging employees to find emotional fulfillment outside the workplace, Perrewe says. Though many managers will find that strategy unpalatable, "it might actually make someone whose motivation was pegged to rising up the corporate ladder less frustrated and more productive, albeit less committed to the organization."

Almost as surprising as the result of this study, given the continuing turmoil in the American work place, was the near dearth of responses to the center's offer for help in coping with these changes. Of the hundreds of companies on the Center for Human Resources Management's mailing list, only the one engineering firm asked for assistance.

Perrewe is philosophical about that. "A lot of companies feel they are fighting for financial survival. It's not the sort of environment that gets managers to thinking much about the emotional needs of their employees." Buried deep in the American Management Association's study of layoffs, however, is this interesting tidbit: "In the long-term, firms that increased their training budgets after work force reductions were twice as likely to show increased profits and productivity as firms that cut their training expenses."

That would suggest that ax-wielding corporate executives might want to pay some heed to Perrewe's research about the right way to handle layoffs and manage in their aftermath. They just might see a surprising improvement in the very place the job cuts were supposed to have affected in the first place: the bottom line.