Individual effectiveness in outsourcing

Outsourcing has grown enormously over the past few years, however, most of the attention so far has focused on the economics of the transaction, and much less on the human element involved in the transaction. In this paper I focus on call agents and my observations are based upon existing literature and my personal interviews. I suggest that it is challenging for them to identify with client organizations because of cultural differences, tacit contexts and lean communication media used to connect across vast geographical distances. The weak client identification may result in poor performance, inability to build trust with customers and long-term customer satisfaction. However, there are differences across individuals in their ability to deal with these challenges. Those who have a higher self-efficacy, higher pro-activeness and higher cultural intelligence may be more capable than others in their effectiveness. Likewise, organization initiated practices such as careful employee selection, intensive training and use of visible markers of identity may heighten client identification. © 2006 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.