BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING FROM THE EMPLOYEE PERSPECTIVE - A case study of a global change project in a subsidiary in Finland
Enne, Eerika (2013)
2013
Kuvaus
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Tiivistelmä
This research looks at a global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) project from the perspective of local employees in a subsidiary in Finland. The research context is challenging as employees are facing a situation where they have to participate in
outsourcing their own jobs. Situations like this are becoming more and more common as firms focus on core competencies and outsource support functions such as finance and accounting. Before the whole process can be outsourced the local knowledge has to be transferred to the external service provider, but how can the firm motivate the local employees to participate when their own future is uncertain? This research goes inside a local subsidiary and finds out what kind of challenges and dilemmas employees have faced during the early phases of BPO. Managerial interventions that can help or hinder the change and knowledge sharing processes will also be discussed.
This research is a single in-depth case study. The focus is on analysing the human side of managing complex and disruptive changes by looking at the BPO situation from the employee, change management and knowledge sharing perspectives. This research utilises a qualitative research method and the data was mainly collected in semistructured
interviews. As this research follows an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach the research is driven by the empirical results not by the
theory.
Employees found the overall situation of having to outsource their own job very challenging as they could not understand the reasons for the change and they felt they had done their job well. Employees also seriously doubted the change would work in
practice and they suspected the goals will not be achieved. The dilemmas and challenges faced by employees were related to the change itself, change management, communication, the employee’s own situation, knowledge sharing, and organisational structure. The managerial interventions that employees perceived to impact the situation were related to communication, actions of managers and motivators for participating in knowledge sharing.
outsourcing their own jobs. Situations like this are becoming more and more common as firms focus on core competencies and outsource support functions such as finance and accounting. Before the whole process can be outsourced the local knowledge has to be transferred to the external service provider, but how can the firm motivate the local employees to participate when their own future is uncertain? This research goes inside a local subsidiary and finds out what kind of challenges and dilemmas employees have faced during the early phases of BPO. Managerial interventions that can help or hinder the change and knowledge sharing processes will also be discussed.
This research is a single in-depth case study. The focus is on analysing the human side of managing complex and disruptive changes by looking at the BPO situation from the employee, change management and knowledge sharing perspectives. This research utilises a qualitative research method and the data was mainly collected in semistructured
interviews. As this research follows an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach the research is driven by the empirical results not by the
theory.
Employees found the overall situation of having to outsource their own job very challenging as they could not understand the reasons for the change and they felt they had done their job well. Employees also seriously doubted the change would work in
practice and they suspected the goals will not be achieved. The dilemmas and challenges faced by employees were related to the change itself, change management, communication, the employee’s own situation, knowledge sharing, and organisational structure. The managerial interventions that employees perceived to impact the situation were related to communication, actions of managers and motivators for participating in knowledge sharing.