Training is an investment with return in temporary workers

Training is an investment withreturn in temporary workers

A social exchange perspective

Maria Jose ChambelFaculty of Psychology and Education, University of Lisbon,

Lisbon, Portugal, and

Filipa SobralFaculty of Psychology and Education, Lisbon University Institute,

Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether a social exchange relationship betweentemporary workers and organizations is possible. The authors aim to consider whether, when trainingis perceived by an employee as an organizational practice that promotes his or her employability, thisentails a social exchange relationship.

Design/methodology/approach – Surveys from 240 call centre workers were analyzed usingcorrelation and multiple regression to explore relationships between training to promoteemployability, perceived organizational support (POS) and affective commitment.

Findings – The data support the idea that social exchange theories are useful frameworks inexplaining temporary workers’ affective commitment towards organisations. Organisationalinvestment in training was positively related to the affective commitment of these temporaryworkers. However, employees attributed greater importance to the fact that training increased theiremployability than to the number of training hours received. The relationship between this humanresource management practice and affective commitment partly occurred through the perceivedorganisational support. Such perception partially mediates the relationship between training as apromoter of employability and this positive attitude.

Research limitations/implications – The study is limited due to sample nature and the lack oflongitudinal design. It does not provide implications for other types of commitment that may berelevant for temporary workers (continuance commitment, for example).

Practical implications – An important implication from this research is that employers should notassume that training is an investment without return from temporary workers. Developmentalopportunities, while important to all employees, did make temporary workers more committed toorganizations.

Originality/value – The paper is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to assess training aspromoting employability with a specific measure. While the results are simple, they refute manystereotypes of temporary workers and add an important perspective to the human resourcemanagement literature.

Keywords Temporary workers, Training, Employment, Job satisfaction, Portugal

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionThe number of temporary workers has increased over recent years both in the USAand in Europe. Nowadays most organisations are confronted with having tosimultaneously manage different status employees. However, literature on how

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Training is aninvestment

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Career Development InternationalVol. 16 No. 2, 2011

pp. 161-177q Emerald Group Publishing Limited

1362-0436DOI 10.1108/13620431111115613

companies manage their employment modes remains sparse and we currently knowvery little about appropriate policies and practices for managing such temporaryworkers. Lepak and Snell (1999) put forward an exceptional structure of employmentpractices for this group of employees. Based on both strategic and cost/benefitconsiderations, the authors were of the opinion that since these workers have lowervalue and less uniqueness, human resource management practices should be simple,carrying lower investment in training and development activities and in performanceappraisal and reward-based jobs, while also focusing on prescribed procedures orspecified results. In accordance with the Barnard-Simon notion of“inducements-contributions exchange” (Barnard, 1938; March and Simon, 1958),temporary workers respond to this narrow and short-term commitment on the part ofthe organisation with a more restricted relationship. This narrow relationship mayhave a devastating effect on organisations since they threaten employees’ affectivecommitment, which is an indispensable attitude in guaranteeing efficacy and survivalin current organisations (Rousseau, 1995).

Currently, this issue has gained an even more important weight as the nature oftemporary work and the temporary workforce itself has changed over time: in the past,organisations employed temps to undertake low-skilled, clerical positions, butnowadays temporary workers may also be found in professional and technicaloccupations. In the past, the use of temps was considered to be a “stop-gap”, whereasnow it has become clear that organisations are using temps as a part of theircompetitive strategy (Burgess and Connell, 2006). Consequently, the decision tomanage temporary workers with no or lower investment could be a bad option. If theorganisation values affective commitment on the part of the temporary worker, thenthe organisation itself should demonstrate its commitment towards temporaryworkers. Koh and Yer (2000) demonstrated how temporary employees managed underthe mutual investment relationship (managers expected temporary workers to acceptjob assignments outside their primary area of expertise and invested in the employees,developed training and attributed fringe benefits) generally performed better and hadmore favourable attitudes than those managed under the other unbalancedrelationships.

Furthermore, Koene and Van Riemsdijk (2005) found that affective attitudes andappropriate behaviour of temporary workers were dependent on “special attention”from the organisations, including recognition of their specific needs in the process ofselection and contracting, in task descriptions and in training and socialisation.Employability, i.e. the possibility of attaining a new job, has been considered animportant need for temporary workers that is central to explaining their affectivecommitment (De Cuyper and De Witte, 2008). Moreover, training has been pointed outas a human resource management practice that enhances temporary workeremployability by providing workers with the appropriate opportunities to developtheir skills and performance (Forrier and Sels, 2003).

However, the literature on strategic human resource management considerspractices to influence workers’ outcomes through social exchanges (Collins and Smith,2006; Ostroff et al., 2000). As described by Blau (1964), social exchanges entailunspecified obligations; when one person does another a favour, the expectation ofsome future repayment exists. Employees tend to adopt a social exchange relationship

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at work, with a pattern of reciprocity determining the perceived balance in exchangesover time. Through human resource management practices, organisations conveyfavourable treatment towards workers, while the workers, themselves, respondreciprocally with a positive attitude towards the organisations (Blau, 1964; Gouldner,1960). Training is related to temporary perceptions regarding the treatment receivedfrom the organisation and these perceptions are what, in turn, are directly linked totheir affective commitment (Mitlacher, 2008). The perception of organisational support(POS) has been considering the global perceptions of treatment received fromorganisations (Eisenberger et al., 1986).

Thus, we propose and test a model aimed at clarifying relationships betweentraining and temporary workers’ affective commitment, as well as the role of POS inthis relationship. As can be seen in Figure 1, we assume that when temporary workersperceive training as a benefit that promotes their employability they will have a higheraffective commitment towards the organisation. However, we consider training to berelated to affective commitment through a positive employment relationship developedby temporary workers with the organisation. Indeed, when these workers perceivetraining as a benefit that promotes their employability, they have a higher perceptionof organisational support, which, in turn, will be related to more affective commitment.

This relationship is consistent with both ideas that regard affective commitment onthe part of temporary workers as being related to training (Finegold et al., 2005) anddependent on a social exchange (Guest, 2004; Rousseau, 1995), however theirintegration is in need of empirical confirmation.

The importance of training for the affective commitment of temporary workersThe relationship between temporary employment and organisational commitment hasbeen frequently investigated (Connelly and Gallagher, 2004; De Cuyper et al., 2008;Liden et al., 2003). Affective commitment is an emotional attachment to theorganisation, which enables individuals’ beliefs and acceptance of the organisationalgoals and values, their efforts towards organisational goal accomplishment and theirdesire to maintain organisational membership (Monday et al., 1979). It is an attitudethat encourages lower absenteeism, turnover and turnover intentions, as well as higherjob satisfaction, organisational citizenship behaviours and job performance (Mathieuand Zajac, 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1997; Monday, 1998; Riketta, 2002, 2008).

Training has been considered a crucial human resource management practice forpromoting employees’ affective commitment towards the organisation and has beenincluded in the different conceptualisations of human resource systems: highperformance work systems (Huselid, 1995), human capital enhancing human resourcesystems (Youndt et al., 1996), commitment human resource systems (Arthur, 1992;Lepak and Snell, 2002) and high-involvement human resource systems (Lawler, 1992).

In order to analyse the mechanism that enables a relationship between training andemployees’ affective commitment to be established, it is important to consider

Figure 1.Research model


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employees’ motivation (Wright and Snell, 1991) and perceptions of such humanresource practice (Nishii et al., 2008). So that training may exert its desired effect onemployees’ affective commitment, it first has to be perceived and interpretedsubjectively by the employee in a way that will engender such attitudinal reaction(Wright and Nishii, 2007). Employees’ attitudinal reactions to training are based onhow they attribute the management’s intention when implementing this practice.Employees will respond to training with a favourable attitude (i.e. affectivecommitment) when they perceive that the management’s intention is based on agenuine concern for the need of employees (Nishii et al., 2008).

With temporary workers, the need to acquire a new job is crucial in their motivation(Kluytmans and Ott, 1999). Training can be an important human resource practice thatprovides employees with the ongoing opportunities for developing their skills andimproving their behaviours. For the employee, having the opportunity to develop a setof transferable skills through training can be seen as a valuable benefit that is offeredby organisations and enhances their chances of gaining employment in the internaland external labour market (Finegold et al., 2005; Forrier and Sels, 2003). In order togain commitment from temporary workers, the company has to establish an implicitlearning contract which will increase temporary workers’ employability (Finegold et al.,2005).

H1. Training as promoted employability is positively related to affectivecommitment.

Training and employment relationship of temporary workersResults of studies comparing the affective commitment of temporary workers withpermanent workers have proven to be inconclusive. In the same studies temporaryworkers report better or comparable affective commitment, while in others they reportworse (see De Cuyper et al., 2008). One of the aspects that have contributed to such aninconsistency of findings is that commitment depends more on how employees aretreated by the organisations than on workers’ temporary or permanent status(Gallagher and Connelly, 2008). This treatment entails the employment relationshipdeveloped by temporary workers and it is this relationship that may explain thetemporary workers’ commitment (Chambel and Castanheira, 2007; Guest, 2004). Inaccordance with the Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964), based on the assumptionthat people establish relationships with others according to expectations of return frominvested resources and with the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), which alsoestablishes that people feel obliged to respond positively to favourable treatmentreceived by others, we found that when temporary workers perceived favourabletreatment on the part of the organisation, they responded with affective commitmenttowards it.

Perceived organisational support (POS) has been increasingly adopted to analysethe employment relationship (Aselage and Eisenberger, 2003). POS is grounded insocial exchange (Blau, 1964) and captures workers’ perceptions regarding the degree towhich the organisation values their contributions and cares about their well-being(Eisenberger et al., 1986; Eisenberger et al., 1990; Shore and Tetrick, 1991). High POSelicits the expectation that effort on behalf of the organisation will be rewarded by theorganisation and engenders an obligation to repay the organisation for the support

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received. POS signals employees’ perceptions in terms of the level of the organisation’scommitment to them and in support of the norm of reciprocity, a positive relationshiphas been found between POS and organisational affective commitment (see Rhoadesand Eisenberger, 2002). As far as temporary workers are concerned, for example, VanBreugel et al. (2005) verified that agency supportiveness, namely related to problemsolving, career support and communication satisfaction, was an important factor topromote agency affective commitment of temporary agency workers. Coyle-Shapiroand Morrow (2006) observed that client POS related positively to client affectivecommitment and Connelly et al. (2007) confirmed this result and further suggested thatclient POS also related to affective commitment towards the temporary agency. Lidenet al. (2003) demonstrated that simultaneously, the POS of each one of theseorganisations is positively related to the affective commitment experienced by theemployee in relation to the respective organisation, client or agency.

Eisenberger et al. (1986) argued that employees develop POS based on accumulationof rewards and punishments received over time from other, more powerfulorganisation members. Thus, an employee’s history of rewards, which result fromvarious human resource practices and decisions, would contribute to perceivedorganisational support (Wayne et al., 1997). Training is a sign that employees areconsidered important for the survival and success of the organisation (Takeuchi et al.,2007; Wayne et al., 1997) and suggests investment in employees and shows recognitionof employee contributions (Allen et al., 2003). When employees interpret training as areflection of the organisation’s appreciation, investment and recognition, workers tendto perceive themselves as being part of an ongoing social exchange relationship, asopposed to a purely mercantile relationship (Shore and Shore, 1995). Indeed, training isa POS-related practice as it represents organisational investment and commitmenttowards the employee (Wayne et al., 1997). As previously mentioned, training has to beperceived as an instrument for employability in order to represent organisationalinvestment and commitment towards temporary workers. Thus, temporary workerswill positively relate the perception of training as a promoter of employability to POS.

On the other hand, studies have shown that POS is an important mechanism toexplain the relationship between organisation practices and workers’ affectivecommitment. For example, Rhoades et al. (2001) found evidence that POS mediated therelationship among organisational rewards, procedural justice, and supervisorysupport and affective commitment. Allen et al. (2003) showed that the relationshipbetween supportive HR practices (growth opportunity, fairness of rewards andparticipation in decision making) and affective commitment were mediated by POS.Moideenkutty and colleagues (Moideenkutty et al., 2001) have found that proceduraljustice, distributive justice, communication satisfaction with the supervisor, and thecooperative labour-management relationship climate influence POS, which, in turn,will also influence affective commitment. In the case of these temporary workers, Lidenand colleagues (Liden et al., 2003) demonstrated that POS mediated the fair treatment(procedural justice) of both the agency and client organisation and the commitment tothe agency and commitment to the client organisation.

We believe that the perception of training as a promoter of employability will berelated to POS and lead to affective attachment to the organisation due to temporaryworkers’ perceptions that the organisation supports and cares about them.


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H2. POS mediates the relationship between training as promoted employabilityand affective commitment.

MethodStudy contextCall centres (CC) are one of the organisational sectors with the highest rate of growththroughout the world, providing employment for many temporary workers (Shire et al.,2009). In Portugal, CCs comprise more than 55,000 workers’ positions and representaround 1 per cent of the Portuguese GNP (Cardoso, 2006). Between 2003 and 2006,Portuguese CCs flourished at a rate of 20 per cent per year and, in 2007 and 2008increased by a rate of 15 per cent (DBK, 2007). CCs, like many other organisations,employ temporary workers as a means to increase organisational flexibility. CCsdecide to employee temporary workers as a flexible response to a different client needor to market fluctuations (Abraham, 1990; Shire et al., 2009).

This study was carried out in a call centre of a Portuguese company that managesCCs. This organisation’s core business is customer service and telemarketing. Itemploys 7,000 workers, distributed among 30 shops and 22 call centres (3,947 positionsfor customer service), of which 78 per cent are temporary agency workers. As far asemployment policies are concerned, this company keeps on the workers with thistemporary status and the best workers may be promoted to supervisor, trainer orquality controller. For this to occur, the organisation demands that the agency ensuresa permanent contract.

Sample and procedureA total of 240 call centre employees (80 per cent of the population) participated in thestudy. All of them were temporary agency workers, at the same call centre, performedsimilar tasks and came from different agencies. They participated in training sessionsto learn how to perform their tasks and deal with the equipment and also somebehavioural and attitudinal procedures in the relationship with the client (Russell,2008). The number of training hours depends on the product and process complexity,and whenever they involved higher competence levels, the worker received longertraining.

The workers were mainly female (61.7 per cent), with an average age of 27.4(SD ¼ 7:6) years and a low average tenure rate (13.7 months, SD ¼ 12:1). The averagetraining duration rate was 50.7 hours (minimum of 12 and maximum of 90).

Data collection took place during individuals’ work schedule in small groupsaccompanied by a researcher who explained his/her affiliation and the main researchgoals. The participants were volunteers and the results were reported to them as wellas to their manager (survey feedback method). All respondents completed the surveyanonymously and were assured by the researcher that their responses would remainconfidential.

MeasuresTraining as promoted employability. Based on the literature that included training as astrategic human resource management practice and on employability literature, wehave developed six items to assess training as promoted employability. The call centre

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HR manager also read the questionnaire and checked for ambiguous or unfamiliaritems, and also examined whether it covered the most important aspects of training aspromoted employability. Items were scored on a five-point Likert scale (1 ¼ disagree,5 ¼ agree). In order to inspect the scales’ construct validity, we performed anexploratory factor analysis with principal axis factoring extraction. A single-factorsolution was imposed as a one-dimensional conceptualisation of training, sincepromoted employability was considered the most appropriate concept for the ideasbeing tested in the study. All six items had factor loadings of 0.73 or above on a singlefactor, and this factor explained 62.17 per cent of the variance, with an eigenvalue of3.73. These factor loadings are shown in Table I. Scale scores presented good reliability(alpha ¼ 0:87).

Perceived organisational support. We used the short version of the PerceivedOrganisational Support survey developed by Eisenberger et al. (1986) which included17 items, an example of a POS item being “The (organisation name) really cares aboutmy well-being”. Items were scored on a seven-point Likert scale (1 ¼ strongly disagree,7 ¼ strongly agree). Scale scores’ internal consistency (Cronbach alpha) was a ¼ 0:91.

Affective commitment. We used Meyer et al.’s (1993) affective commitment scale.The scale included six items. An example item was “I feel a strong sense of ‘belonging’to (organisation name)”. Items were scored on a seven-point Likert scale (1 ¼ stronglydisagree, 7 ¼ strongly agree). High scores on this scale indicate high levels of affectivecommitment. The scale scores’ internal consistency (Cronbach alpha) was a ¼ 0:84.

Control variables. Age, gender and tenure are relevant predictors for commitment(Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow, 2006; Felfe et al., 2008; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990). Thus, wecontrolled for tenure (in months), demographic variables (gender was coded “0” if therespondent was female and “1” if the respondent was male) and age (in years). Hours oftraining may also be related to affective commitment (Finegold et al., 2005) or to POS(Wayne et al., 1997) and we controlled hours of training.

ResultsDescriptive statistics for all study variables are reported in Table II.

In order to investigate whether training as promoted employability makes a uniquecontribution to the prediction of affective commitment, a hierarchical regressionanalysis was conducted. To control for age, gender, tenure and hours of training thesevariables were entered as a first step. In the second step, we entered training aspromoted employability. As can be seen in Table III, there was significant change in

Training as promoted employability item“The training in which I have participated in that organization . . .” Factor loading

1. Has contributed to improving my work performance 0.782. Has transmitted knowledge which has promoted my professional development 0.833. Has contributed to the probability of my staying in that organization 0.794. Has transmitted knowledge that has promoted my personal development 0.825. Has made me multipurpose, thus increasing my value in the work market 0.796. Has increased the possibility of finding employment elsewhere, if necessary 0.73

Note: Principal axis factoring analysis with single-factor extraction

Table I.Factor loadings for the

training as promotedemployability scale


167

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Table II.Descriptive statistics andzero-order correlations forall variables

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the square multiple correlations attributable to the inclusion of training as promotedemployability for the workers affective commitment (b ¼ 0:51, p , 0.001). Asexpected, the more temporary workers perceive training as promoted employability,the higher their levels of affective commitment. Thus H1 was supported.

H2 postulated that perceived organisational support mediated the relationshipbetween training as promoted employability and workers’ affective commitment. Inorder to test this hypothesis, hierarchical regression analyses and Sobel-tests wereconducted. According to Baron and Kenny (1986), mediation can be said to occur when:

. an IV is significantly related to the mediator;

. the IV significantly affects the DV in the absence of the mediator;

. the mediator has a significant unique effect on the DV; and

. the effect of the IV on the DV decreases upon the addition of the mediator to themodel.

To test the first requirement, perceived organisational support was regressed ontraining as promoted employability (b ¼ 0:50, p , 0.001, see Table III). The secondcondition was tested in the first hypothesis. The third condition was fulfilled –perceived organisational support predicted temporary workers’ affective commitment(b ¼ 0:54, p , 0.001, see Table III). In line with the fourth condition, the effect oftraining as promoted employability decreased upon the addition of perceivedorganisational support. An additional Sobel-test indicated (Peacher and Hayes, 2004)that this decrease was significant (Z ¼ 6:56, p , 0.001, see Table III). Thus H2 waspartially supported. For temporary workers the perceived organisational supportpartially mediated the relationship between training as promoted employability andworkers’ affective commitment.

DiscussionOne main concern in our study was to understand the influence of training ontemporary workers’ affective commitment and to verify whether it was mediated

POS Affective commitmentb of 2nd step b of 2nd step

Age 0.04 0.23 * * * 0.21 * * * 0.21 * * *

Gendera 0.01 20.19 * * 20.16 * * 20.19 * *

Tenure 20.07 0.13 * 0.13 * 0.15 * *

Hours of training 20.12 * 20.07 20.04 20.03Training PE 0.50 * * * 0.51 * * * 0.31 * * *

POS 0.54 * * * 0.39 * * *

F 19.85 * * * 22.26 * * * 25.61 * * * 28.75 * * *

R 2 adjust 0.29 0.31 0.35 0.42AR 2 0.24 * * * 0.24 * * * 0.27 * * * 0.34 * * *

Z (Sobel test) 6.56 * * *

Notes: PE ¼ promoted employability; POS ¼ perceived organizational support; aDummy variablecoded 0 if female and 1 for male; *p , 0.05; * *p , 0.01; * * *p , 0

Table III.Regression analyses:

predicting workers’commitment from

training and mediationby POS


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through perceived organisational support. We assumed that when these workersperceive training as a benefit that promotes their employability, they tend to perceivehigher organisational support, which, in turn, will be related to more affectivecommitment towards the organisation.

Our findings supported these assumptions. When temporary workers perceivetraining as promoting their employability, they report higher affective commitmenttowards the organisation. As suggested by Finegold et al. (2005), when trainingtemporary workers, it is possible to develop a value chain. The investment made by theorganisation has the return of employees’ acceptance of the organisational goals andvalues and their efforts towards their accomplishment. This is very important in thecall centres’ context since service customisation and quality advocate the importance ofthe quality of employee-customer interaction, which can only be assured by highemployee commitment (Batt, 2002; Holman, 2005).

Furthermore, our results revealed a negative link between hours of training andaffective commitment (r ¼ 20:15, p , 0.05) and the result turned out to beinsignificant when the interpretations of training as promoted employability weretaken into consideration in the regression analysis (b ¼ 20:07, n.s.). This confirmsthat in order to elicit commitment from temporary employees, it is important toconsider more than participation in training (Finegold et al., 2005). The relationshipbetween training and temporary workers’ affective commitment depends on whethertraining is perceived and interpreted as a practice connoting higher levels of concernfor their needs (Nishii et al., 2008). As employability is a need regarded by temporaryworkers that should be accommodated by the organizations in question, when theyconsider such expectation as having been fulfilled, they tend to respond with affectivecommitment (De Cuyper and De Witte, 2008).

However, we found that the relationship between hours of training was alsonegative with the perception of training as promoted employability and with POS. Thismay have occurred due to the fact that workers received more training when they hadmore complex tasks, but the content of training may have been more specific withgoals to standardise workers’ attitudes and behaviours. This specificity andstandardisation may have pervasive effects on workers (Holman, 2005).Alternatively, more training hours may increase the expectation for higherrecognition on the part of the organisation, perhaps a direct contract with it. As thisis not an organisational policy, workers perceive a breach of expectation and decreasetheir perception of training as a promoter of employability and POS. These hypothesesrequire further research to control for the effect of both the training content and themotivation to achieve an in-house position on the part of temporary workers.

As expected, we verified in this study that training is related to the employmentrelationship of temporary workers. In line with Koh and Yer (2000) we found that itwas possible for the organisation to create a mutual investment relationship withtemporary workers: the organisation invested in training and the employee respondedwith a social emotional relationship. When training was perceived by temporaryworkers as a recognition of their needs (e.g. employability), they conceived themselvesas a part of a social exchange, and reciprocated the support from the organisation withaffective commitment (Allen et al. 2003; Shore and Shore, 1995). Furthermore, thishuman resource practice in the context of temporary workers indicates discretionary

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investments in the sense that the organisation is not obligated to offer this practicesince there is a work regulation that establishes the obligation to promote training forthis group of employees. It is in situations of discretionary investments that humanresource practices promote perceived organisational support (Eisenberger et al., 1986).However, we found that the relationship between training and temporary workers’affective commitment is only partially mediated by perceived organisational support.These results indicated that training was either directly related to this attitude or toanother mediator which was not accounted for in this study. Baron and Kenny (1986)considered social contexts to be very complex for explaining the relationships betweenvariables with only one mediator. With temporary workers we know that there areother variables involved in employment relationships that contribute to explainingemployees’ affective commitment. Also, in accordance with the norm of reciprocity,temporary workers’ perception of a compliance/breach of psychological contract on thepart of the organisation (i.e. the extent to which the employee considers theorganisation to be (or not be) complying with its obligations) will influence his/heraffective commitment level (Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow, 2006; McDonald and Makin,2000). In fact, De Cuyper and De Witte (2008) argued that the psychological contracts oftemporaries include employability obligations on the part of the organisation, and lowemployability may evoke perceptions of a psychological contract breach, which isrelated to low affective commitment. Further research should examine thesimultaneous role of the psychological contract and perceived organisationalsupport to explain the temporary workers’ employment relationship and training asantecedents for this relationship.

In addition, the neutral value that we found for POS and affective commitment(approximately four on a seven scale) is similar to that reported by Liden andcolleagues (Liden et al., 2003), lower than that described by Connelly and colleagues(Connelly et al., 2007, approximately five) and higher than that found by Coyle-Shapiroand Morrow (2006), (approximately three). These different findings are consistent withthe idea that temporary workers may develop a different employment relationship(Guest, 2004). Future research should clarify the role of the temporary worker’s desireto acquire an in-house position, the role of the organisational motive to choosetemporary workers and the role of treatment on the part of the organisation to explainthis relationship (Gallagher and Connelly, 2008).

LimitationsOur research has a number of limitations that need to be acknowledged. First, thisresearch study was carried out at a single point in time and does not permit causalrelationships to be established among the variables. The direction of the relationsbetween variables that we have assumed could, in fact, be reversed. However, thehypothesized relationships were based on generally accepted relationships betweenhuman resource management practices and employees’ attitudes relations (Lepak et al.,2006) or human resource management practices and employment relations (Rousseau,1995; Shore and Shore, 1995). Second, our research focused on call centre workers andthe possibilities for generalisation to other occupational groups needs to bedemonstrated. However, call centre workers represent a growing sector thatemploys a large percentage of temporary workers and where the need for


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employees’ affective commitment is acknowledged (Batt, 2002; Holman, 2005). Third,and also on the issue of generalisation, this research study involved temporary agencyworkers. Research is required on workers with other contingent statuses, namelyfixed-term or on-call (Gallagher and Connelly, 2008). Nonetheless, literature hasdemonstrated that fixed-term workers are most similar to permanent employees andother types of temporary workers have fewer training and development opportunities(Aronsson et al., 2002). Moreover, the research sample had specificities that may hindergeneralisation. The majority of operators at the organisation where this research wascarried out had temporary contracts and were not given the opportunity to gain anin-house position. These conditions may have been directly related to their perceptionof POS and affective commitment (Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow, 2006). Most notably,within the context of the temporary agency workers requires consideration of bothemployment relationships, one toward the client and the other toward the temporaryagency (Connelly et al., 2007; Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow, 2006; Liden et al., 2003).Fourth, we only analysed the affective form of commitment, but other authors(Connelly et al., 2007; Van Breugel et al., 2005) showed that continued commitment isalso important to explain the employment liaison of temporary workers. However, thisform is the most frequently studied and the most practically relevant (Coyle-Shapiroand Morrow, 2006). Fifth, we only analyse an organization practice, but other studiesconsidered the relevance of employees’ career attitudes (for example, boundaryless andprotean) to explain commitment (Brikoe and Finkelstein, 2009) or the employees’careers stage to explain employment relationship (Hess and Jepsen, 2009). Futureresearch should include employees’ careers attitudes and stages and analyzing therelationship between them and training, employment relationship and employees’attitudes toward organization. Finally, one of the fundamental principles of strategichuman resource management is that the impact of human resource practices onemployees’ attitudes is best understood by examining the configuration or system ofthese practices and not each isolated practice (Lepak et al., 2006). In this study we onlyanalysed the relationship between training and commitment and we neglected thepotential explanatory value of unmeasured human resource practices. Future researchshould include other human resource practices, conceptualising them within a systemand analysing the system’s relationship with temporary workers’ motivation, attitudesand behaviours.

ConclusionsThis research contributes to supporting the idea that social exchange theories areappropriate to explain temporary workers’ affective commitment towardsorganisations. Our study went a step further by demonstrating that, when studyingtemporary workers, a specific “coin of change” has to be included (De Cuyper andDe Witte, 2008). As with permanent employees, temporary workers may develop asocial employment relationship. It is in the interests of organisations to ensure thatthese workers are well treated, as they acknowledge that thus being, they will obtain avery positive response (Chambel and Castanheira, 2006, 2007; Coyle-Shapiro andKessler, 2002; Guest, 2004; Van Dyne and Ang, 1998). We found that training can becrucial to temporary workers’ interpretations of the treatment received from theorganisation (Mitlacher, 2008). When temporary workers perceive that training has the

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potential to satisfy an important need for them, namely employability, they tend toevaluate the organisational support as higher and, thus, reciprocate with higher levelsof affective commitment.

Research developed in different organisational contexts has shown that temporaryworkers have noticeably fewer opportunities for training (Aronsson et al., 2002;Feldman et al., 1994; Virtanen et al., 2003). This study may contribute to changing thissituation. Investments in training are good for both temporary workers andorganisations, contributing to an effective employment relationship. With this studywe have shown that temporary workers’ training is a yield-bearing investment: thepromotion of a socio-emotional relationship between workers and the organisation,which promotes affective commitment.

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About the authorsMaria Jose Chambel is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Lisbon University where shereceived her PhD. Her research interests include employment relationships, psychologicalcontract and human resource management with temporary workers. Maria Jose Chambel is thecorresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]

Filipa Sobral is a researcher in a project about temporary workers at Lisbon University. Shereceived her Master Degree from ISCTE/IUL. Her interests include management of temporaryworkers, training and employability.


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