Volume 19, Number 3 Article by Prarthan Desai September, 2007
Identification towards Clients in Employees of Outsourcing Service Providers :
In the recent past India has become an important destination for global outsourcing of software- and software-enabled services, commonly known as information technology services (ITS) and information technology enabled services (ITES). Employees working in an outsourcing service provider organisation are formally part of the employing organisation. However, they spend a significant part of their daily work life handling the outsourced business processes of client organisations. They are exposed to the organisational routines, culture, and performance appraisal and reward criteria that may be influenced by both their employing organisation and the client organisation. In this paper, Prarthan Desai proposes that such employees may exhibit dual organisational identification: one towards the employing organisation and the other towards the client organisation.
Organisational identification refers to employees’ perception of belongingness to their organisation. It is important to understand employees’ organisational identification because it can influence both important individual outcomes, such as psychological well-being of employees, and organisational level outcomes, such as cooperation among employees and organisational citizenship behaviour. This conceptual paper focuses on the factors that may influence employees’ identification towards the client. Conceptual arguments are provided for the following three propositions: (1) the lower the codifiability of knowledge involved in the outsourced activity, the stronger the identification towards the client; (2) the higher the amount of interaction with the stakeholders of the client (e g, suppliers, employees, or customers) required in the outsourced business process, the stronger the identification towards the client; and (3) the greater the amount of relation-specific investments required by the employing organisation for the client, the stronger the identification towards the client. This paper is an important extension of the extant theorisation on employees having dual perceived organisational identities. The theorisation may be particularly useful to outsourcing service providers who attempt to move up the value chain and make their services increasingly knowledge-intensive.
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