An assessment of employee perception of the effects of the privatization and the management of its process in the Saudi Telecom Company

Since the 1970?s when privatization began in the UK under Margaret Thatcher, it has become the main vehicle of structural change from developed to developing countries. It is changing the way businesses are seen and also the economic market in which they operate. Some see them as the progress to development and the free market economy, while others see them as neo colonialist and capitalist movement for supremacy led by the US. Privatization is one of the most fundamental organizational changes that a company can undergo. In the case of large state owned organizations such as the Saudi Telecoms Company (STC) it takes years to accomplish and the disruption to organization systems and personnel is vast. Thus the interviews with the STC staff formed the core source of empirical evidence of employee perceptions of the change process under investigation. More than 200 managers from STC and from all ethnic groups will be interviewed to identify differences in HR practices before and after privatization and their attitudes towards the social transformation regulations. The interviews were of middle level managers in departments in STC that the HR department who coordinated the interviews permitted the researcher to reach. The current study partly falls into the descriptive category since its purpose is to describe the effects of the privatization process on the employees in STC but also it is explanatory because it aims to explain the effects of the privatization on the workforce. The research will therefore be carried out within STC entirely, taking the views of employees who worked in the organization before privatization, and those who joined the organization after the process of organizational change from a public corporation to private company was complete.