I am working for a company which opened its regional office in my country since last year. I started 11 months ago and I was told by HR that company has bright future and it values its employees by giving them bonuses and market competitive yearly salary increments.
With in 4 months of my joining the technical manager resigned due to clashes with top management, who was later preceded by another manager who has limited technical experience. He then started hiring his past colleagues and started giving them key positions.
I was then working as lead developer on a project and I was promised by new manager that he'll recommend me for team lead position as I had worked from start of this project and I had domain knowledge. But later he added one of his own people in my project who assumed role of team lead.
Now my review is due in one month along with couple of other developers and I over heard manager saying that he's recommending HR to bring new people instead of giving us yearly increment and relieve us from job.
Is it ethically correct ? what should I and other developers do? Should we search for new job and resign from current one(this will be of loss to us as we worked a year for same pay and we were hopping to get reward for our hard work) or should I contact HR who hired us and promised good rewards ?