To schedule or not to schedule? Agentic and cooperative teams at call centers

Frontiers in Psychology

Danilo Garcia¹ 

关键词: agency;    communion;    call center;    self-managing teams;    responsibility;    cooperation;    self-directedness;    well-being;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00999

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Work at call centers is often designed around technical solutions that imply some type of work schedule—every second that an agent is not on the phone amounts to precious queue time that must be managed (Durrande-Moreau, 1999). Even activities such as coffee brakes are scheduled (Garcia et al., 2012) and most call centers define a minimum percentage of the scheduled “time on the phone” (Garcia and Archer, 2012). This type of work design might imply unfavorable working conditions for employees, which in turn affect well-being, learning, and how agents cope with the rapid external and internal changes in working life. Indeed, performance at call centers (measured as the percentage of time on the phone/scheduled phone-time) has been shown to be negatively related to important work climate aspects (e.g., sense of autonomy and responsibility, relation with managers and colleagues; Garcia and Archer, 2012), employees' view of how successful the organization is in reaching its core values (e.g., communal values such as helpfulness toward the customer or colleagues; Garcia and Archer, 2012), and also employees' well-being (e.g., positive affect, life satisfaction). Scheduling agents' time on the phone might also limit their ability to work efficiently within the allocated working time (i.e., performance), probably because the amounts of incoming calls are completely outside the leaders' or employees' control—a common characteristic of workplaces in which services are delivered by phone (Ryan and Ployhart, 2003). A work situation with high demands and low freedom, through rigorous control of working procedures, creates a feeling of lack of control which can cause mental overload, in turn, leading to mental and physical health problems. Moreover, the low level of responsibility that is also common in call centers (e.g., employees do not need or are not expected to make decisions to improve services), along the lack of environmental control and performance monitoring, might influence agents to become passive (Karasek, 1979) and disempowered (Archer et al., 2014; Jimmefors et al., 2014).

【 授权许可】

CC BY