Temporary agency work and HRM in Australia

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the management of agency workers in Australia and, in particular, to identify the challenges presented to HRM by agency work. Design/methodology/approach After briefly reviewing the data on the incidence and growth of agency work in Australia, this paper examines the role of agency work in Australia from the perspective of the industry. Then it reviews both the evidence concerning the reasons for client organisations using agency workers and the attitudes of agency workers to their work. The paper concludes by assessing the implications of these findings for both for HR managers and HRM in general. Findings When the attitudes and preferences of agency workers are compared with those of direct employees it is found that agency workers are no more satisfied with their level of flexibility than direct workers and are in fact less satisfied with their job security, skill utilization and development, pay, autonomy and influence at work. Given these findings, it is argued that agency work may be incompatible with HR strategies that are based on high performance work practices. Originality/value This article gives helpful advice to HR managers in any organization that are in the market for agency workers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.