تعهد سازمانی و مشتری در میان کارکنان قراردادی

This study examines affective commitment to employing and client organizations among long-term contracted employees, a new and growing employment classification. Drawing on organizational commitment and social exchange literatures, we propose two categories of antecedents of employee commitment to client organizations. We tested our hypotheses using a survey collected from employees in four UK contracting organizations delivering a service on behalf of a government entity. The results suggest that perceived client organizational support and attractiveness of the client organization relate positively to employees’ affective commitment to the client organization. Furthermore, affective contractor commitment explained unique variation in client affective commitment beyond that accounted for by the client-based predictors, suggesting that employees’ commitment to their own contracting organization is important to explaining employees’ commitment to the client organization. We suggest that a greater reliance on social exchange theory may provide a basis for understanding commitment in its different forms and foci.

Many new employee–employment relationships are presently evolving and one of the newest and fastest growing forms involves the use of third parties who place employees with client organizations on a long-term basis (Connelly and Gallagher, 2004, George, 2003 and Lepak et al., 2003). In this study, we focus on such an employment relationship where a contractor (e.g., a professional employer organization) agrees to handle a set of work responsibilities on a long-term basis for a client organization at their work location. The contractor supplies the employees and is the legal employer of record. In other words, the contractor and the client organization formulate a shared employer relationship vis-à-vis the contracted employee, creating a triangular system of employment relations (Kalleberg et al., 2000 and McKeown, 2003). Such arrangements have proven to be confusing even to employees themselves as some will regard their contractor as their employer while others see their client organization as the main point of reference (Rubery, Carroll, Cooke, Grugulis, & Earnshaw, 2004).