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The influence of labelling and social exchange on group cohesion of IT-contract employees

Published: 29 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Employee turnover in IT sector remains one of the most persistent challenges facing organizations. IT services organizations have been contracting their employees to support the global client requirements. There is an increasing trend in using IT contract employees in organizations, both at the service provider side and in the client organizations. With the increasing presence of contract employees, their interaction with employee co-workers could have impact on the group performance and turnover intentions. In this article, drawing on the categorization and labelling theories, we argue that the practices followed in client organizations to identify the contract employees by using distinct signifiers, such as different badging, Email ID prefixes, work location assigned to contract employees etc., will evoke a set of cognitions, which can have a negative influence on the group cohesion. We also propose that the quality of social exchange between the employee co-workers and contractors, and the quality of social exchange between the line manager and contract employee can attenuate the negative influence on group cohesiveness. The proposed conceptual framework is important in terms of understanding the relationship between contractors and employee co-workers from a managerial perspective.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGSIM-CPR '14: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people research
    May 2014
    204 pages
    ISBN:9781450326254
    DOI:10.1145/2599990
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 29 May 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. contract employeer
    2. employee co-worker
    3. employee turnover
    4. group cohesion
    5. it
    6. labelling
    7. organization
    8. social exchange
    9. social exchanger

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