Vers une psychologie ergonomique du bien-être et des émotions : les effets du contrôle dans les centres d'appels

Abstract

This paper presents an ergonomic evaluation of the effect of organisational control on operators' well-being in two call centres within the same company. Two questions are raised. The first relates to the effects on well-being of intensive emotional work required in call centres ; the second is centered on the reactions of operators who are continually monitored with the data processing system which is largely used in this branch of industry. In the two call centres where this study took place, the task requires the worker to detect, assess and manage the emotions at both ends of the line, and both the management and the training lay down the way in which this should be achieved. The work must therefore be considered first and foremost as emotional work. A specific methodology centered on the well-being evaluation was exploited. Our research was focused on a comparison of two call centres in the same organisation. It combines several sources of information : emotions expressed during work activity, interviews with concerned employees, and analysis of reactions and social standards within the team of workers. For the emotional part, we video-recorded the activity and asked the operator to specify the nature and intensity of the emotions related to various phases of their work. We also interviewed the operators to collect subjective appraisal of their task and working conditions and we asked them to justify the strategies they used to accomplish their tasks, as it is now standard practice in ergonomics. This was aimed at identifying the coping strategies. The conclusion underlines the importance of compatibility between the modes of control and the nature of the tasks, when complex tasks requiring initiative in association with a detailed level of control are perceived as intrusive by the workers. Even if current technologies allow for continuous and precise monitoring of human performance in modern work situations such as call centres in the interests of well-being, it may be better not to exploit the full possibilities of these technologies. It underlines the need for reducing controls in particular when the task requires creativity. It also confirms that in that call centres, even if the relations with the customers seem to be related to a strong emotional load, this relation could not being central for what their well-being is concerned. The employees suffer more from the management style and the control mode which they live as intrusive (for one call centre studied) and from the difficulty of managing time in their activity (for the other). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)