Employee Well-being in Call Centres

Abstract

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.