Call centres and job satisfaction in Italy: employment conditions and socio-biographical patterns

ABSTRACT

The article examines job satisfaction in 21 Italian call centres. The results of research carried out on 1715 handlers indicate how dissatisfaction prevails among call centre representatives (CCRs) and how it is influenced by aspects related to some organisational characteristics (service delivered, size and organisational typology), on one side, and to different aspects of working conditions (contract, wage and tenure) and participants’ biographical and working profiles of CCRs (gender, age, educational attainment), on the others. However, the most interesting finding emerges by distinguishing different dimensions of job satisfaction (extrinsic and intrinsic-relational). In particular, the relationship between type of contract and job satisfaction is rather interesting. For non-permanent workers, in fact, the probability of being dissatisfied is decidedly greater if we consider the extrinsic dimension of job satisfaction. Instead, when the intrinsic-relational dimension is taking into account, atypical workers are no more dissatisfied than the permanent ones. Job insecurity and limited perspectives in terms of work alternatives, safeguards and rewards, seem to be the source of greatest dissatisfaction for Italian CCRs. This certainly does not surprise considering the Italian development model and its dualistic labour market, highly segmented between insiders and outsiders.

KEYWORDS:

• Call centres
• job satisfaction
• labour market regulation
• working conditions
• socio-biographical profiles

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Davide Arcidiacono Assistant Professor of Economic and Labour Sociology at the Department of Sociology at the University of Catania. He is a member of the editorial Board of the journal POLIS (Il Mulino) and OPEN Sociology Publishing Series (Franco Angeli). He is the editor (with Pais I. and Gandini A.) of the monographic issue of THE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, entitled "UNBOXING THE SHARING ECONOMY: opportunities and risks of the era of collaboration" (Sage).

Maurizio Avola Associate Professor of Economic and Labour Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences – University of Catania. For years he has dealt with issues related to local development and the labour market, with particular attention to the employment of immigrants, flexibility and atypical forms of employment, and the North–South dualism. Among his most recent works: The Ethnic Penalty in the Italian Labor Market: A Comparison between the Center-North and South (in ‘Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies’ 2015).

Rita Palidda Full Professor of Economic and Labour Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences – University of Catania. She wrote various essays on the themes of local development, women's work, and social exclusion.

Notes

1 Comparative analyses give us a fairly differentiated scenario from this point of view. In addition to company strategies, organisational typology (in-house/outsourcing), sectors of activity and tasks (inbound/outbound) and the working conditions of CCRs are closely connected to industrial relations systems and labour market regulation (Altieri, 2002; Doellgast et al., 2009; Holman et al., 2007; Shire, Mottweiler, Schönauer, & Valverde, 2009; Van Jaarsveld, Kwon, & Frost, 2009). If, on the one hand, flexibility (numerical, wage, time) has seemed, up until now, a generalised response to fluctuating demand in a highly competitive market, on the other hand, HR strategies are defined within a broader scenario, which is heavily influenced by legislative, contractual and contextual constraints and opportunities.

2 The research has been funded by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and was carried out between 2009 and 2010. Data entry and data analysis took a long time. The first descriptive publications were produced between 2012 and 2013. The elaboration of a multivariate model required considerable work on the dataset and the first significant elaborations were produced around 2015/2016.

3 The only difference among the call centres was the initial contact to start the snowball. When possible, we relied on the collaboration of a company’s management; where greater resistance was encountered, we bypassed management and identified CCRs to interview using our initial collaborations with trade union representatives and/or team leaders. Respondents represent 22% of the total CCRs in the twenty-one call centres selected.

4 We decided not to include a neutral intermediate category so that the interviewees were obliged to take a standpoint.

5 Cronbach’s alpha evaluating the internal consistency reliability of the scale is 0.83.

6 As for the overall satisfaction, these two sub-indicators have also been standardised.

7 Atypical contracts may be divided almost equally between fixed-term contracts and ‘project work’, a historically widespread form of para-subordination in Italian call centres, above all for CCRs doing outbound work. Scarce, instead, is the recourse to temporary work.

8 The limits defining various levels of satisfaction (low, low-middle, middle-high and high) are represented by quartiles of the ranges of the respective standardised scales.

9 Moreover, CCRs state they sometimes or even often have their say in organising work shifts and weekly days off.

10 Despite comparisons with other research findings nearly always being unadvisable when there are differences in the selection of samples, survey instruments and the indices used, we feel it important in this case to note them since the deviations are considerable (eg., in none of the studies mentioned above does the number of dissatisfied CCRs exceed that of satisfied CCRs).