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Mitigating the Adversity of Outsourcing: Outsourcing from the Employee’s Perspective

Schillen & Steinke

Mitigating the Adversity of Outsourcing:
Outsourcing from the Employee’s Perspective
Sarah J. Schillen
Seattle Pacific University
USA
sschillen@gmail.com
Gerhard Steinke
Seattle Pacific University
USA
gsteinke@spu.edu

ABSTRACT
This paper explores how outsourcing activities and decisions put the well-being of the remaining employees at risk, ultimately affecting productivity and creating further costs to the employer. It highlights four potential threats to remaining employees: trust, job satisfaction, motivation, and stress. The paper provides several suggestions for mitigating these impacts, including communication to retain trust, acting ethically to ensure satisfied employees, seeking an understanding of employee perspectives to build employee motivation, and providing good planning along with training and development to reduce employee stress.
INTRODUCTION
Globalization provides organizations with more options than ever before. Business leaders are continuously encouraged to adapt, reevaluate, and strategically improve processes and approaches. Best practices are reinvented rapidly in attempt to keep up with market trends. The quest to recognize new methods for increasing revenue has become the inspiration for exploring new management techniques and strategies. One such rising trend in the advent of global markets is that of outsourcing. Common purposes for outsourcing include improvements to performance, cycle time, cost-savings, market share, productivity, customer service, and quality
(Elmuti & Kathawala, 2000) in industries such as information systems/technology, human resource, logistics and administrations, real estate, transportation, marketing, sales and finance
(Logan, Faught, & Ganster, 2004). Outsourcing benefits are publicized and cited in

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