Well-being and Organizational Behavior of Agency Workers. Some Evidence from the National Study on the Temporary Work Agency Industry

Nowadays the number of agency workers are ever increasing and it is a persisting and significant type of contemporary employment in the Italian labour market. Although the use of agency contracts has become the norm in all public and private organizations, existing studies are mostly cross-sectional in nature, generally comparing behavioral differences between permanent full time workers with the plethora of all contingent workers (part-time, contracted, outsourced, temporary, agency, etc.), making difficult to generalize results. Several issues related to how to manage temporary and agency workers have been discussed in practical and literature (Guest et al., 2010; Koene et al., 2014), but still few empirical investigations have studied some aspects of workers and how their attitudes and behavior influence their work and other work-related attitudes (e.g. Liden et al., 2003; Galais and Moser, 2009; Giunchi et al., 2015; Borgogni et al., 2016). In particular, there is no consensus about how agency contract affects the satisfaction and the well-being of workers (in terms of workers outcomes), raising questions concerning the applicability of existing individual behavioral and psychological variables as commitment, job insecurity, satisfaction, burnout, turnover intention. In order to fill this gap, we aim to offer a contribution by studying well-being and organizational behaviors of agency workers. As well known, agency workers differ from other type of “contingent” staff in that they are employed by a Temporary Work Agency (TWA), but principally managed by a client organization. Due to their nature, workers face a rather unique employment situation in which they build a double relation with two organizations: the TWA, that is the nominal employer and the client organization assigned. McLean Parks et al. (1998) and Lapalme et al., (2011) talking about multiple agency relationship.