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A study on strategy of employment flexibility and the response from workers ¡Ð Using professionals under different employment relationships as an example

Professional workers are the core value contributors to an enterprise in today¡¦s highly competitive environment of knowledge economy. Under the pressure of global competition, employment flexibility is an unavoidable trend. Contract workers with professional background have been growing rapidly in recent years, and it has been regarded as a competitive strategy to integrate corporate resources to enhance business performance. While more and more enterprises are adopting flexibility strategies as well as utilizing different types of contingent employment to replace traditional long-term employment, the other existing employees not only have to face the changes of employment relationships, but also have to get used to cope with lots of contract-based professionals working in the organization.
The purpose of this research is to understand different cognition, attitude and behaviors from the professionals under different employment relationships, as well as the way they interact, while the organization is adopting the human resource strategy of numerical flexibility. The information was collected and analyzed based on qualitative research method and used the professional workers as sampling, including one regular employee and one contractor for every comparative pair. There are total twenty-four professionals from four leading global high-tech companies were interviewed.
The result shows that both the regular and contract-based professionals recognized the employment flexibility strategy negatively, and believed that it¡¦s mainly for reducing employment cost only, which might reflected the short-term benefit, but would cause the negative impact on the organization¡¦s performance in the long run. The implementations of differentiated treatments to different employment models caused disagreement from the workers who had expected their employers to provide a fair working environment, sufficient human capital investment and stable career development in the organization. The findings are, a respecting and open-minded organizational culture, a fair workplace, proper contingent employment proportion, and supportive management are the key factors to facilitate the positive interaction among professionals under different employment relationships. Moreover, professional workers have higher motivation and take into account the importance of personal performance, therefore, regular employee will invest personal resources to solve problems from interacting with contract professionals in order to achieve tasks. Meanwhile, the contract professionals are affected by occupational commitment as well as their intention to extend employment contract in the future. Employment status does not influence their performance, however, reduction of unfair treatments regarding human resource practices will motivate their willingness on organizational citizenship behavior and performance improvement.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0907104-002714
Date07 September 2004
CreatorsLin, Chao-Yin
ContributorsShu-Chuan Yeh, Ying-Jung Yeh, Jin-Feng Uen, Jyh-Jer Ko
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0907104-002714
Rightswithheld, Copyright information available at source archive

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