Commitment, trust and work behaviour. The case of contingent workers
| Published date | 01 October 2003 |
| Date | 01 October 2003 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480310488351 |
| Pages | 588-604 |
| Author | Dick de Gilder |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Commitment, trust and work
behaviour
The case of contingent workers
Dick de Gilder
Faculty of Social Sciences, Free University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Keywords Trust, Job commitment, Justice, Employee behaviour, Contingent workers
Abstract In this study differences in trust, commitment and justice perceptions were investigated
between contingent and core employees in two hotels, as well as their effects on work behaviour.
Contingent workers showed lower commitment to the team and to the organisation, and displayed
less favourable work-related behaviours than core employees. Commitment to the team mediated
between job status (contingent vs. core employees) and five work-related behaviours. Furthermore,
depending on job status, trust and commitment were differentially related to work-related
behaviours. The implications of these results are discussed.
Introduction
In today’s organisations, a considerable part of the work force consists of
contingent workers, people who are willing to perform a job for an employer on
the basis of a contract of limited duration. People who have colleagues for a
short while, maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe six months or more.
Whatever the duration of the contract is, contingent workers know that the
relationship with their employer and with their colleagues, in principle, will end
at a time they usually know when they start their job.
This type of relationship is generally considered as transactional in nature
(McLean Parks and Kidder, 1994). People do a task for a limited time, get paid
for it and leave the organisation. It is exchange-based, very much like Taylor’s
(1911) ideas about the “economic man”. However, in the second half of the
twentieth century people in most developed economies had become used to a
stronger relationship between them and the organisation they were working
for. People were typically working full-time, holding permanent and often
life-time jobs: they had become “organisation men” (Whyte, 1960).
Despite the significant increase in contingent work (see e.g. Hartley, 1995;
McLean Parks et al., 1998), there has been relatively little theoretical and
empirical work set to understand the consequences of the changes in the
organisations’ work force on job attitudes and work behaviour (Van Dyne and
Ang, 1998). The purpose of the present research is to deepen the current
knowledge on these issues, by comparing attitudes and behaviours of core
employees and contingent workers who perform comparable jobs. A further
aim is to investigate to what degree job attitudes play a role in the emergence of
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PR
32,5
588
Personnel Review
Vol. 32 No. 5, 2003
pp. 588-604
qMCB UP Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480310488351
job behaviours; that is, whether or not job attitudes mediate between job status
and job behaviours.
Evaluating the contract: justice and trust
Although there are different views on the consequences of changing
employment relations, contingent work is often positively evaluated by
employers. Taking an economic perspective, in general, an organisation’s
ability to adjust the work force to immediate needs, results in significantly
lower labour costs in comparison to organisations that tend to offer permanent
jobs for every level in the organisation (Pfeffer and Baron, 1988). In economic
downturns, people with a temporary contract can be laid off without having to
be paid premiums to laid off personnel and without the risk of strikes or other
types of protests. In times of economic recovery, organisations that are
uncertain about the strength of the recovery may be hesitant to employ people
on a permanent basis, whereas others can adapt to the situation by hiring
temporary employees until it is clear that expansion is permanent. Thus,
employers who adopt contingent work into their human resource strategy may
have a competitive advantage to those who do not (Lepak and Snell, 1999).
With regard to the consequences of contingent work for workers, the
literature is much more diverse. Some researchers are outrightly negative about
contingent work, suggesting it has grave consequences for contingent workers
at the lower end of the job market, who have low job security and few chances
for advancement (Kalleberg et al., 2000; McLean Parks and Kidder, 1994;
Rogers, 1995). They generally argue that workers, in exchange to the poor
treatment by the employers, are likely to have unfavourable job attitudes and
to perform poorly in comparison to workers with a permanent contract. Other
researchers contend that contingent employees are valuable resources to the
organisation that may contribute to innovation and higher effectiveness of the
organisation (e.g. Lepak and Snell, 1999). Looking at the empirical evidence on
the effects of job status on job attitudes and performance on the job, the only
conclusion one may draw is that the results are inconclusive. In some studies
contingent workers show less favourable attitudes and poorer job performance
than core employees (e.g. Van Dyne and Ang, 1998), whereas no effects of job
status were found in others (e.g. Pearce, 1993).
The seemingly contradictory results of studies on the effects of job status
reveal some problems in the literature. First, the concept of job status is much
more complex than might be expected on the face of it. Contingent workers
may differ from core employees in many other ways than in job status alone.
Often it is difficult to compare employees with a different job status, because
the tasks being performed by both groups have a different content. Frequently,
certain types of jobs, predominantly jobs requiring few skills and with
relatively unfavourable task characteristics, are only performed by contingent
workers and not by core employees (McLean Parks et al., 1998). Sometimes
Commitment,
trust and work
behaviour
589
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