Strategic deception in call centers: impacts on well-being, cognition, and work motivation

Abstract

The literature indicated that deceivers in face-to-face communication experience psychological strains derived from guilt or distress associated with violating conversational rules. We proposed that this also applies to telephone-mediated deception. Drawing insights from the theoretical and empirical literature, we surmised that strategic trickery utilized by outsourced call center agents would elicit adverse psychological reactions that have unfavorable impacts on their well-being, cognition, and work motivation. We used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses using data from a sample of 554 outsourced Filipino call service agents who worked graveyard shifts to cater to mainly American customers. The results suggested that strategic deception increases the experience of cognitive dissonance while negatively impacting psychological well-being and intrinsic work motivation. The results also showed that dissonance negatively influences well-being and intrinsic motivation and partially mediates the deception-motivation relationship. Unlike previous findings, however, our multivariate analyses revealed that well-being and motivation were not correlated. Our original findings have theoretical and practical implications.

Keywords:

• Cognitive dissonance
• intrinsic motivation
• outsourced call centers
• psychological well-being
• strategic deception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used in this study are stored at Science Data Bank.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.