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Redesigning computer call center work: a longitudinal field experiment
Author(s) -
Workman Michael,
Bommer William
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.247
Subject(s) - psychological intervention , job satisfaction , psychology , intervention (counseling) , work (physics) , applied psychology , customer satisfaction , service (business) , job design , social psychology , marketing , job performance , business , engineering , mechanical engineering , psychiatry
Computer technology call centers provide technical assistance to customers via the telephone to solve computer hardware and software problems. The simultaneous demands for technical and customer service skills often place strain on call center employees, frequently producing poor job attitudes. We utilized a field experiment ( N = 149) with a randomly assigned pretest–posttest and control group design to compare three interventions' effectiveness on employee job attitudes in a computer technology call center: Intervention 1 focused on aligning organizational structures; Intervention 2 focused on increasing employee involvement in work processes (high‐involvement); and Intervention 3 implemented autonomous work teams. We found that high‐involvement work processes produced the most potent effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment attitudes, as well as on performance (i.e., improved customer satisfaction scores, increased closed problems, reduced problems escalated, and fewer repeat calls). Further, we found that group work preference moderated the results between the group‐oriented interventions and employees' job satisfaction. Under high involvement and in autonomous work teams, high preferences for group work resulted in greater job satisfaction than when employees had lower preferences for group work. However, preferences for group work were not associated with increased organizational commitment in either intervention. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.