Call Centres and Human Resource Management

There has been a substantial growth of employment in telephone call centres over the last five years. It is now estimated that around two workers in every 100 in the United Kingdom have jobs in call centres (Income Data Services, 2001, p. 11; Key Note, 2002, p. 19). In the USA they employ about 3 per cent of the workforce while in Europe the figure is just over 1 per cent (Datamonitor, 1998; 1999). Call centres are said to be the most rapidly growing form of employment in Europe today (Paul and Huws, 2002, p. 19). The number of call centres in France and Germany has more than doubled since 1997 (Key Note, 2002, p. 79). These developments reflect a more general shift in economic activity from goods production to service provision. Call centres epitomize many of the characteristics of service work that have come to dominate developed economies. Like most customer service organizations they provide an intangible, perishable product, which is highly variable and engages the customer in its production (Korczynski, 2002). However, distinctively, call centres require their employees to be skilled at interacting directly with customers while simultaneously working with sophisticated computer-based systems which dictate both the pace of their work and monitor its quality.

Currently, call centres appear to be the bête noire of organizational types. Call centres have been labelled as ‘electronic panopticons’, ‘dark satanic mills of the 21st century’ and ‘human battery farms’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 1998; Garson, 1988; IDS, 1999). These are hardly the most positive of images. One reason for these poor images is the impact that call centre work is perceived to have on the well-being of customer service representatives (CSRs), that is, front-line phone staff. In particular, attention has focused on the possible effects that job design, performance monitoring, human resource (HR) practices and team leader support may have on employee well-being. However, although such links have been proposed, few empirical studies have examined them in any great depth. The main aim of this chapter is to examine the effects of job design, performance monitoring, HR practices and team leader support on four measures of employee well-being, namely anxiety, depression, intrinsic job satisfaction and extrinsic job satisfaction. Furthermore, given that call centre work has been highlighted as particularly stressful, it is also worth considering whether it is any more stressful than other types of work. As such, the other aim of this chapter is to compare well-being in call centre work to that in other comparable types of work.

Industrial restructuring, technological change and a greater interest in new management practices have focused attention on the shift from an industrial to ‘post-industrial’ or ‘knowledge economy’. Within this broader rubric of organizational and social change, there has been considerable debate about how labour is managed and the causes, nature and implications of these changes. An extensive literature has analyzed shifts from traditional control-based labour management to a commitment-based human resource (HR) approach (Bell, 1974; Walton, 1985; Drucker, 1993). This debate, which is particularly relevant to call centre operations, pivots on the relevance of post-industrial and, more recently, postmodern models of managerial control (Frenkel et al., 1999; Thompson and Warhurst, 1998).