Work Relationships in Telephone Call Centres: Understanding Emotional Exhaustion and Employee Withdrawal
基于澳大利亚电信业五个呼叫中心480名员工的调查数据，用结构方程模型分析发现，客户互动、高工作负荷和任务单一会加剧情绪耗竭，进而导致员工缺勤率上升。
This paper examines the nature of employment and the conditions of work in five telephone call centres in the telecommunications industry in Australia. Call centre work typically requires high levels of sustained interpersonal interaction with customers which can lead to burnout and employee withdrawal. Customer service staff can also become targets of customer hostility and abuse. In addition, this form of work tends to involve extensive employee monitoring and surveillance with little job discretion or variety of tasks. The paper draws upon survey data from 480 telephone service operators to identify the factors that are associated with emotional exhaustion and the frequency of absence amongst the employees. A modelling of the data using LISREL VIII revealed that a number of job and work‐setting variables affected the level of emotional exhaustion of employees. These included interactions with the customer, a high workload and a lack of variety of work tasks. Moreover, higher rates of absence were associated with emotional exhaustion.