Control and involvement HR practices in Indian call centres: still searching for answers

Abstract

Call centres were established primarily to reduce organizational costs while simultaneously providing high-quality customer service. To support this 'twin constraints' strategy, a range of human resource (HR) practices tends to be used in call centres that focus simultaneously on both control and involvement. To date, there has been a lack of empirical evidence concerning the outcome of such HR practices on call centre frontline staff (call centre representatives -CCRs). Consequently, this paper attempts to bridge this gap using a sample of 250 CCRs from Indian call centres. The findings show that, while the simultaneous use of involvement-and control-oriented HR practices had a positive impact on CCR job satisfaction, it also resulted in employee exhaustion and disengagement. These findings suggest that while involvement-oriented HR practices enhance CCR job satisfaction, they come at a cost which is potentially a key factor leading to high CCR turnover.

High-Performance Work Systems in the Healthcare Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

“…For example, employee level variables such as perceived organizational support (Liao et al, 2009; Tang et al, 2017), employee discretionary efforts (Cafferkey & Dundon, 2015), customer need satisfaction (Martinaityte et al, 2019), employee motivation (Cafferkey & Dundon, 2015; Kundu & Gahlawat, 2016), employee engagement (Alfes et al, 2013; Li et al, 2019, Muduli et al, 2016), employee morale (Zhang et al, 2013), aggregated service orientation (Aryee et al, 2016), employee self-efficacy (Jyoti & Dev, 2016), intrinsic motivation (García-Chas et al, 2014), leader–member exchange quality (De Oliveira et al, 2015), employee trust (Appelbaum et al, 2000; Kundu & Gahlawat, 2016; Rubel et al, 2018), person to organization fit (Lv & Xu, 2018), psychological capital (Karadas & Karatepe, 2019), employee psychological safety (Miao et al, 2020), presenteeism (Ananthram et al, 2018), service recovery (Karatepe & Olugbade, 2016), job discretion (Chang et al, 2018), manager goal congruence (Zhang et al, 2018), employee resilience (Cooke et al, 2019), learning orientation (Jyoti & Dev, 2016), employee voice (Miao et al, 2020), service behaviours (Luu, 2019), work pressure (Heffernan & Dundon, 2016), job stress (Appelbaum et al, 2000), service-oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (Kloutsiniotis & Mihail, 2020a; Sun et al, 2007), workplace bullying (Page et al, 2018), psychological contract breach (Lv & Xu, 2018), human resource flexibility (Úbeda-García et al, 2018), public service motivation (Luu, 2019), knowledge management (Jyoti & Rani, 2017), job crafting (Meijerink et al, 2020), work intensification (Chang et al, 2018), absence intentions (Karatepe & Olugbade, 2016), etc., can be examin...…”

Managing human resources in information technology and business process offshoring firms operating in Asia: a literature review toward theoretically and contextually grounded research

“…Agarwal, Khatri and Srinivasan (2012), on the other hand, focused on challenges for HR, including managing HR across globally distributed teams, the shortage of professionals with sufficient knowledge and competencies, the low‐skilled nature of the work, and the lack of well‐developed HR systems and processes. Mathew, Subramanya and Agarwal (2010) focused on the critical role of HR in specific functions such as recruitment, culture‐building, and training and development, and Ananthram, Teo and Connell (2017) demonstrated how the use of “involvement‐and control‐oriented HR practices” can positively influence employees’ job satisfaction, but eventually lead to employee exhaustion and disengagement.…”

Competence assessment and development in India

“…To survive and thrive in today’s digital age, human resource (HR) managers and/or HR development (HRD) professionals need to keep their workforce engaged (Gupta and Shaheen, 2017, 2018; Gupta et al , 2018) and up to date (Ananthram et al , 2018). However, it requires identifying and bridging the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) gaps for each employee (Bohlouli et al , 2017).…”