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The purpose of this paper is to set out to analyze the supervisor psychological contract as a new psychological contract focus. Furthermore, the relationship between this psychological contract and the organizational psychological contract is compared in the prediction of job satisfaction and organizational affective commitment among a sample of traditional (in-house) and temporary agency workers.

The hypotheses were tested with multiple group analyses in a sample of 444 Portuguese call center workers: 215 were in-house and 229 were temporary agency workers.

Results confirmed that workers, regardless of their status, distinguished these two foci of psychological contract. However, for temporary workers, the supervisor psychological contract partially mediated the relationship between the organizational psychological contract and attitudes; while for in-house workers the organizational psychological contract was relevant to explain job satisfaction and the two foci of the psychological contract related independently to workers’ affective commitment toward the organization.

The study is limited due to the nature of the sample (call center sector where temporary agency and in-house workers received similar opportunities and treatment) and the lack of a longitudinal design.

An important implication of this research is that employers should assume the relevance of the supervisor for temporary agency workers. The social exchange between them and the host organization occurs in part through his/her actions.

Although supervisor psychological contract has been acknowledged, as far as the authors know there are no empirical studies that support its existence or analyzes its relevance in worker-organization relationships.

Temporary agency work (TAW) has increased enormously in recent decades. Most temporary agency workers are pushed involuntarily into this work arrangement and prefer permanent work arrangements. Therefore, the motive to find a permanent job through TAW is predominant for the majority of temporary agency workers. However, little is known about what helps in obtaining a permanent job in a client organization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social skills by simultaneously considering the human capital aspects and motivational background of the individuals for transition success.

The paper is based on a questionnaire study of 151 temporary agency workers with two measurement points. The questionnaires were first administered at the very beginning of their work as a temp and again five months later.

The findings show that the social skills of temporary agency workers in contrast to various aspects of human capital and motives for temping had a significant impact on becoming a permanent worker in a client organization.

The generalizability of the finding that social skills help temporary agency workers to find a permanent job in a client organization may be restricted due to the particularities of the work setting in the clerical sector. The incidences as well as the determinants of transition success may depend on the industry sector because of the respective assignment characteristics as well as the clients’ reasons of using temporary agency workers. Future research should investigate more thoroughly the role of assignment characteristics for the experiences of the workers.

Social skills seem to play a crucial role for transition success in TAW. Qualification measures should therefore include the training of interpersonal behavior. It would be desirable when the involved organizations would assume responsibility in this respect. Furthermore, policy makers should provide adequate training formats since they promote TAW as a stepping stone opportunity for unemployed people.

This paper suggests that career mobility in the context of flexible work arrangements may be driven by more informal processes of social integration into the existing permanent team. While TAW is seen as a temporary solution in Germany, this study focuses on the individual determinants of transition success of temporary agency workers that is still rare in studies on the topic.

Traditionally, hiring indefinite duration contract employees has been the dominant method used by U.S. organizations to staff their labor needs. Indefinite duration contract employees, hereafter referred to as “regular” employees, have three defining characteristics: (1) they are hired directly as employees of the organization whose work they perform; (2) the duration of the employment relationship is unspecified, with a mutual expectation that it will continue as long as it is mutually satisfactory; and (3) the employment relationship provides ongoing – as opposed to intermittent – work. When their demand for labor increases, organizations staffed exclusively by regular employees can respond by having their employees work overtime or by hiring additional regular employees. Conversely, when their demand for labor decreases, such organizations can either maintain “inventories” of excess regular employees or reduce labor inputs by laying-off or reducing the work hours of regular employees.

The growing incidence of precarious employment across many sectors is a serious challenge for a developing country like India. Neo-liberal arguments justify precarity as essential for the development of the free market economy and advocate realigning human resource practices with an ever-changing business environment and labor cost conditions. This chapter seeks to identify the determinants and dynamics surrounding precarity of workers engaged in temporary employment in India. It uses the unique Employment and Unemployment Survey data set published by the National Sample Survey Organisation of Government of India for two time periods 2009–2010 (66th Round) and 2011–2012 (68th Round) to bring out the dimensions of precarity and identify the determinants (both micro- and macro-levels) of participation in temporary employment. We find that precarious employment is most likely to affect the young, women, non-union members, those belonging to minority and socially deprived communities with low land holding and low educational status. Precarious employment is also most pronounced in states where labor-intensive industries are exposed to global import competition and where labor laws are rigid. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the economic and social policies that Indian governments have adopted in recent years.

Using Spanish establishment-level data on temporary and permanent job and worker flows, we examine firms’ relative usage of fixed-term contracts in response to changes in their prior net employment expectations for the short-run and the long-run – viewed as proxies of how a wide variety of future shocks are ultimately perceived by establishments. The employment response of establishments to changing net employment expectations for the short-run is, primarily, suggestive of their reliance on fixed-term contracts as a buffer to cushion short-run changes in demand as well as to shield permanent workers from downward workforce adjustments. In contrast, their response to changes in net employment expectations for the long-run mostly hints on the use of fixed-term contracts as a screening device. Therefore, policies providing financial incentives to convert fixed-term into permanent contracts – thus targeting firms’ using fixed-term contracts as a screening device, are likely to only have limited effectiveness.

The tea plantation industry is characterized by the large-scale deployment of cheap women laborers and gender-blind practices that make the social positions of women workers vulnerable. This paper considers women temporary workers in tea gardens to study the exacerbated impact of Covid-19 on their lives. The impact of the pandemic on marginal tea garden women laborers has not received enough attention from researchers; hence, the authors have studied the gendered implications of the pandemic on Adivasi temporary women workers in tea gardens in India. “Adivasi” is an umbrella term to refer to all indigenous tribes in India.

The authors conducted a qualitative study with 26 in-depth interviews with women temporary workers who identify themselves as Adivasis. For the discussion, the authors have mainly borrowed from intersectionality and subalternity literature.

The analysis explored the intersectional experiences of the women temporary workers (1) as members of Tea Tribes who are compelled to continue working at tea gardens as wage laborers, (2) job insecurities at work due to their temporary worker status, (3) disadvantages faced by women workers for their gender identity and (4) the gendered impact of the pandemic on their lives.

This study has explored the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of temporary women workers who belong to ethnic minority groups in the global south. The exploitation of labor rights in the tea industry during the pandemic has not been discussed enough by researchers earlier.

This study aims to investigate the effects of temporary workers and works councils on process innovations at manufacturing sites. The impact of temporary workers, commonly viewed as a means of operational flexibility and cost savings, on firms’ ability to innovate is underexplored. Works councils represent and help integrate temporary workers, but are often equated with unions, which have been criticized as barriers to innovation, especially in the US.

The authors use secondary data collected by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) of the German Federal Employment Agency. Specifically, the authors conduct a series of regression analyses using 11-year panel data covering the period 2009–2019 with 11,641 manufacturing site-year observations.

The results suggest that the use of temporary workers initially promotes process innovation, but at too high a level, it impairs firms’ ability to innovate. Furthermore, the results suggest that works councils have a positive impact on innovation and dampen the curvilinear effect found with respect to temporary workers.

Research has largely focused on the cost and flexibility benefits of temporary workers. The authors analyze the effectiveness of temporary workers in terms of innovativeness. By including works councils, the study also consider the contextual environment in which temporary workers are employed. Finally, the results reject the assumption that works councils have a similar negative impact as unions on innovation; in fact, the authors find the opposite.

This paper aims to investigate the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers in Pakistan and Cambodia.

Quantile regression estimator is likely to be the most relevant to the sample.

The estimates indicate the presence of a temporary employment wage penalty in Pakistan and contrarily a wage premium in Cambodia. Moreover, quantile regression estimates show that wage differentials could greatly vary across the wage distribution. The wage gap is wider at the bottom of the wage distribution in Pakistan, suggesting a sticky floor effect that the penalty of being in temporary jobs could be more severe for disadvantaged workers. By contrast, a glass ceilings effect is found in Cambodia, indicating that the wage premium is small at the bottom and becomes high at the top of the pay ladder.

Despite the rise of temporary jobs in the past several decades, the empirical evidence on wage differentials between temporary and permanent workers is extremely limited in developing Asian countries. This paper is the first research work that systematically examines the temporary-permanent wage gap in selected Asian countries, based on their National Labor Force Survey data.

Based on agency perspective on temporary agency workers, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between firms’ agency problems and agency cost on agency workers; moreover, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are considered in seeking to understand how they moderate this relationship.

Using the Hsinchu Science Park directory of corporate affiliations as a sample frame, the authors adopted a paired questionnaire which included two parts in order to consider the possible problem of common method variances. The first part is completed by the manager of the firms and the second part is completed by his/her temporary agency workers. Finally, 94 firms completed questionnaires, providing a total sample of 94 R&D managers and 458 temporary agency workers. The rate of participation was 31.65 percent.

Using a questionnaire survey of 94 high-tech firms, from which a total of 94 R&D managers and 458 temporary agency workers participated, the results show that firms’ agency problems have a positive influence on the agency cost of monitoring temporary agency workers. In addition, while this relationship is negatively moderated by extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation has a non-significant moderating effect.

The managers of firms should consider not only the short-term flexibility of employing temporary agency workers, but also the long-term cultivation of promoting great agency workers. This could maximize the efficiency of the interaction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Of course, the firms should think about how to reduce the agency problems created by goal conflict, information asymmetry and risk sharing with temporary agency workers, because this could also provide a chance for the firms to decrease agency costs spent on monitoring.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue volume that examines a range of concerns, challenges and responses relating to temporary workers and human resource management (HRM).

The paper highlights eight key research questions and describes the structure of the issue. The various articles investigate six main areas: the rationale for using temporary workers rather than permanent workers; factors determining types of temporary work arrangements; the rationale for temp workers entering into temporary employment; the nature and extent of the relationship between TWAs and user firms; the relationship between employment regulations and an organisation's labour use patterns of temporary workers and the HR challenges associated with ongoing and extensive use of temporary workers.

Findings varied according to the main focus of each paper. It is evident, however, that no one perspective, public policy or organisational strategy is likely to fit all situations in relation to temporary work and HRM. Many differences exist in the skill levels of temp workers, their demographic characteristics and reasons for undertaking temp work. Likewise, as pointed out by many of the authors included in this volume, there are also differences within user firms with regard to their reasons for employing temps.

There is a paucity of literature examining temporary work and HRM and this issue endeavours to fill that gap and may prompt further research.