The Contingent Employment In the Italian Healthcare Sector - Advantages and Troubles of the Human Resource Diversity Management

Abstract

The firms use a quantity of variables to face their need of flexibility, as for the human resources, there is a continuous huge resort to new temporary contracts, including both LDC – limited duration contracts and TAWs – temporary agency works, which differ from the long-term and permanent employment model (Barker and Christensen, 1998; Volberda, 1999; Costa, 2001; Bergstrom and Storrie, 2003).In Italy, the contingent employment phenomenon (in particular TAWs) is well expressed in the healthcare sector and it is widely spread among many qualified professionals, first of all the nursing staff.In the healthcare sector, contextually to the flexibility need, the organizations find the necessity to have a good health service quality and to equip themselves with motivated, self-contained, high skilled and high committed workers, who feels a strong identification with the organization. However, those necessities, such as the contingent work spreading and the HR valorization, hardly match together and involve a different approach to the HR management. In fact, the massive use of temporary workers implicate an increasing complexity for the healthcare organizations, that have to deal with several types of workers in the same work groups or in the same professional categories. Moreover, the different contractual status may seriously affect the workers behavior as well as the employment relationships and their performances.In Italy, isolated experiences apart, there are no useful results or well-founded experiences to study that phenomenon and to give evidence to the actuality of it, especially in the healthcare sector. In the light of these assumptions, we assume the main challenge that healthcare organizations are going to face is defining a set of diversified and integrated HR management policies. In other words, HR managers will have to develop and define operational HR choices focused on the valorization of the differences, specifically applying the Diversity Management (DM) and working on the idea that their employees are no more the permanent ones (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Barabino, Jacobs and Maggio, 2000, 2001).This study arises as a working paper issued by early literature analysis and early opinions about the contingent employment and the HR management in the healthcare sector, which is the subject of the research carried out by the two authors in their Phd careers.