N° 157 - Septembre 2024

Overstaffing: Cost to be reduced, or slack to be encouraged?

By Stéphane Deschaintre
Assistant Professor at ISG International Business School

and Salomon Bernier-Khedache
Lecturer at the Management Research Institute (IRG), Gustave Eiffel University, Paris-Est Créteil Universit

Overstaffing is commonly seen as a cost that should be reduced. However, our research, based on two industrial cases, presents company managers who advocate it. To analyze this counterintuitive result, we use the concept of organizational slack. The arguments of the managers are then structured around functions of organizational slack: overstaffing allows them to prepare for the future and to preserve their employees. Showing overstaffing as a slack to be favored is unusual in the present context, and questions more broadly the widespread representations of a workforce that must necessarily be reduced. Our research also sheds light on the concept of organizational slack by showing that it can be consciously rationalized by managers, and therefore be part of a reasoned managerial logic.

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