International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Volume 7 • Number 9 • September 2017 70 Continuous Unplanned Changes and Stress in Greek Public Sector due to Economic Crisis Anna Maria Mouza Department of Business Administration Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia Terma Magnesias, 62124 Serres, Greece Abstract The aim of this study is to determine the main factors influencing the perceived stress levels of public servants due to the recent unplanned changes in Greece. Responses from 811 public servants were obtained to determine the effects of newly imposed legal and operational reforms on stress in relation to demographic variables. Logistic regression was applied given that work stress due to organizational changes was identified as a binary variable. It was found that women, the less educated, low-level and permanent employees experienced higher levels of stress compared to the other categories. Exogenous factors related to the new imposed reforms in working conditions due to the economic crisis (job insecurity, personnel reductions, workload, demands for highly educated employees, decrease on wages) and negative socioeconomic consequences (high levels of unemployment, expensive standard of leaving, high taxation, mortgage repayment difficulties) are the ones increasing the employees’ stress, which they cannot control and easily cope with. Keywords: Reforms, economic crisis, change management, unplanned changes, organizational changes, exogenous factors, perceived stress, public servants, Greece 1. Introduction As a result of the severe economic crisis, Greece in 2010 referred to the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, to seek for financial assistance, in order to preclude the total collapse of the economy. Thus, a memorandum of economic and fiscal policies was signed to establish the framework of a financial stabilization mechanism, provided that Greece will implement the imposed economic and financial adjustment program. The adopted decision settled out the necessary measures to be taken by Greek authoritiesin order to ensure budgetary consolidation reducing deficit in turn. The required measures were characterized by austerity leading to enormous unemployment and high levels of government deficit and debt (Priporas et al., 2015). Regarding the public sector, new policies were implemented including among others salary and benefits reductions, workload, demand for highly educated employees, redundancies, relocations, closure and mergers. The changes imposed to the Greek public sector can comprise unplanned changes which come from unexpected events or crises derived from the external environment and are observed when pressures for change overcome the efforts of the organization to resist (Champoux, 2010: 456; Knowles and Saxberg, 1988). One the other hand, planned or managed changes are conscious decisions and purposively modulated by the organizations (Coram and Burnes, 2001) in contrast to unplanned changes, which are also referred as emergent, unpredictable, unintentional and iterative (Liebhart and Garcia-Lorenzo, 2010). Regarding the Greek public sector it is also noted that until 2010,it did not implement significant managerial reforms, while it was characterized by bureaucracy and high centralization among other factors(Spanou, 2008) leading to low performance and inefficiency. For these reasons, a large number of changes and practices were taken place, as to reduce the administrative costs and to increase the organizations’ efficiency (Plimakis and Papadakis, 2017), thus influencing and affecting the working life of the public servants. There are many indications that the financial crisis in Greece is influencing the psychology due to the decreased quality of work (Kakana et al., 2017) and the stress levels of the public servants’(Mouza and Souchamvali, 2016; Nella et al., 2015). In this context, the current study aims to explore the perceived stress of the public servants deriving from the imposed unplanned reforms which unexpectedly changed their lives and working conditions.