In pursuit of happiness: A sociological examination of employee identifications amongst a ‘happy’ call-centre workforce

Abstract

While psychologists and economists have concerned themselves with employee happiness and well-being, critical organizational theorists have rarely examined employees’ positive responses at work. To explain why call-centre employees in our study responded positively to their organization we adopt a relational sociological approach to examine employee happiness and well-being. This approach emphasizes two main features: firstly, it is sensitive to the interaction of management practices and employee agency in how ‘happiness’ is constructed and interpreted in organizations, including an assessment of power relations; secondly, this approach acknowledges the importance of the wider external context in explanations of why organizations pursue happiness. This article applies these sociological insights to the organizational identifications literature to assess the mechanisms of employee identifications. In this case, there are three mechanisms of identification, a) the organizational value system; b) social relations at work including interactions between employees, the owners and their clients and c) the nature of work. Significantly, these three features converged to produce overlapping and mutually reinforcing identifications.

This study examines a much under-researched phenomenon: a happy workforce. To date, organization theorists have largely conceded the research ground on happiness to economists and psychologists. As Fisher (2010: 385) notes, ‘with rare exceptions, happiness is not a term that has been extensively used in academic research on employee experiences in organizations’. Studies by economists such as Richard Layard, Richard Easterlin and Andrew Oswald focus on devising quantitative indices to measure happiness and well-being at a national level. The term ‘well-being’ has also been increasingly used by psychologists to discuss the notion of a ‘happy workforce’ (see Robertson and Cooper, 2011; Xanthopoulou et al., 2012). This research is dominated by a perspective which focuses on the individual and develops measures of satisfaction and commitment by addressing either specific job characteristics, such as level of interest and autonomy (Morgeson and Humphrey, 2006), or organizational cultures, such as trusting management styles and faith in organizational leaders (Carr et al., 2003). Additionally, as Fisher (2010: 396) notes, apart from studies which seek to link satisfaction to organizational leaders, happiness which may derive from the relationship with others in the workplace has been largely ignored. To address these limitations, we build on insights from work on organizational identifications to develop a sociological approach to understanding workers’ happiness.

Critical organizational researchers have recently focused attention on the pursuit of employee happiness by examining the development of fun cultures within contemporary workplaces (Bolton and Houlihan, 2009). These studies extend understandings of normative and cultural controls (Kunda, 1992; Ray, 1986) which seek to elicit employee identifications with the aim of securing employee commitment to the organization. Specific studies of fun cultures in call-centres highlight how management’s compulsory sociability and organized fun serves as a distraction from punishing Tayloristic control regimes (Houlihan, 2002; Kinnie et al., 2000). Fleming and Sturdy’s (2011) study of a fun culture in a contemporary call centre showed how managers used normative controls to appeal to employee authenticity in order to enhance organizational identifications. Nevertheless, management exhortations to ‘be yourself’ at work resulted in employees’ responding cynically because traditional controls were not superseded. As a consequence of the empirical rarity of ‘happy call-centre’ workers critical researchers have rarely sought to examine happiness at work–indeed we could be accused of shying away from ‘happy endings’–yet our task as critical researchers is to explain the reasons for positive employee responses as we have done so insightfully for negative responses (see Taylor and Bain, 1999; Taylor et al., 2002). The context of our study is very different from the other studies reported as we will develop later–our case study organization departed from Taylorized controls and designed a labour process which allowed employees a high degree of discretion and autonomy in determining the nature of the service delivery with customers. As such, we aim to develop a critical explanation for employee responses which does not resort to presenting employees as unreflective, cultural dupes or afflicted by false consciousness.

To rigorously assess the ‘pursuit of happiness’ and employees’ positive responses to this organization our study adopts a relational sociological approach (Mutch et al., 2006) to the study of organizations. The core tenets of relational sociology are to provide a situated and contextualized account of organizational action and to examine the relations between structures and agency on agential capacity. Consistent with this overall approach we locate this study within the organizational identifications (OI) literature in order to provide an explanation of why employees identify so strongly with this organization. As Ashforth et al. (2008: 334) note, ‘Identification matters because it is the process by which people come to define themselves, communicate that definition to others, and use that definition to navigate their lives, work-wise or other’. However, in a similar vein to the criticisms leveled at the happiness literature, OI research has also been accused of failing to fully take account of the range of organizational factors which may influence identifications. These include social relations in the workplace and the nature and content of work itself (Ashforth et al., 2008; Edwards, 2005; Scott et al., 1998; Sluss and Ashforth, 2008). To attend to these omissions our empirical contribution is to provide a rich qualitative examination of this under-researched phenomenon. The research extends existing research by focusing on the dynamic inter-linkages of three identificatory mechanisms–espoused organizational values, social relations between employers, employees and clients and the nature of the work itself. Conceptually, our relational sociological perspective provides a situated account of the organization by examining the contextual factors which contributed to the reasons why this organization pursued employee happiness and, to acknowledge the interplay of structures and agency in the construction of the ‘happy’ workforce by examining the role of management practices and actors’ interpretations.

Examining happiness and well-being at work

Defining happiness is problematic; happiness is an emotional state which can fluctuate with life events and as such is often experienced as a transitory emotion. As such, psychologists routinely adopt morally-neutral definitions of happiness as subjective well-being, understood as overall satisfaction with our lives or as high average levels of enjoyment and other desired emotions (Argyle, 2001). Consequently, the ‘slippery’ nature of the construct of happiness has led organizational researchers to instead refer to the term Psychological Well-Being (PWB) which is defined by Robertson and Cooper (2011: 54) as ‘the affective and purposive psychological state that people experience while they are at work’. Robertson and Cooper’s definition distinguishes between PWB and job satisfaction–job satisfaction is seen to be a ‘narrower construct’ which refers to whether people are satisfied with the job itself. While job satisfaction is strongly related to PWB, well-being at work is influenced by broader factors which may include the values and reputation of the organization, the opportunity for integrating work and non-work and the degree of communication within organizations (Robertson and Cooper, 2011: 34). More recently, psychologists have used developments from the positive psychology movement to establish the field of positive organizational behavior (POB) (Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008). This literature on well-being and happiness is dominated by quantitative studies which seek to measure the extent of employee well-being and identify the link between well-being and particular organizational and individual characteristics (Holman, 2002; Taris and Schreurs, 2009). Additionally, there is typically an under-lying business-case objective within the well-being and POB field which seeks to demonstrate the connections between employee well-being and organizational and job performance (Baptiste, 2008; Taris and Schreurs, 2009; Wright and Cropanzano, 2000). However, the aim of this article is not to measure happiness, or to determine whether employees really are ‘happy’, but to assess how an organization determinedly set out to promote a ‘happy workplace’ and, to explain employee responses by adopting a relational sociological approach.

Within the HRM literature, Guest (2002) and Peccei (2004) liken the quest to demonstrate the ‘happy-productive worker thesis’ as the equivalent of searching for the Holy Grail. The aim of this research is also to highlight the positive performance outcomes of happy workers. However, attempts to develop causal links between employee well-being and performance share some of the criticisms evident in the HRM and performance literature. Firstly there is the ‘black-box’ problem whereby it is difficult to assess which specific practices lead to well-being and may improve organizational performance. Secondly, the organizational context of well-being is ignored. Paauwe (2009: 137) calls for a more contextual approach to the analysis of HRM by taking into account the ‘wider’ perspective including the institutional setting and its related actors–such as the sectoral and social context. Thirdly, employee voice is often silenced in this research. Both Guest (2002) and Paauwe (2009) contend that in too much HRM research workers at best are considered as a means to an end. Paauwe advocates a shift in HRM from a managerialist preoccupation with the economic benefits of HRM to a value-laden ethical approach which focuses on good management practices for the benefit of employee well-being. Guest (2002: 354) implores HR researchers to adopt more of ‘a worker-centred’ approach to examine well-being such that the focus should move to pursuing HRM in order to enhance worker satisfaction and well-being rather than seeking to ‘prove’ the links to performance.

We would support Guest (2002) and Paauwe’s (2009) attempts to shift the HRM agenda as well as urging researchers to take a more critical, contextualized and situated examination of organizations (Jenkins and Delbridge, 2013). Currently, wider contextual features of the organization such as the local labour market context, market positioning, competitive relations and sectoral conditions are often neglected in these analyses with little emphasis on the reasons why specific organizational strategies may be in pursuit of happiness. Therefore, we have a limited understanding of employees’ own views of what makes them ‘happy’ in work. To focus on explaining employees responses and assess the role of the organizations in more depth we now turn to the insights developed from the OI literature.

Organizational Identifications

Kreiner and Ashforth (2004) stress that identification occurs when organizational members identify with the organization and ‘when they define themselves at least partly in terms of what the organization is thought to represent’. For Edwards (2005: 207) and Scott et al. (1998: 325) the concept of organizational identification (OI) has become increasingly important within organization and management research. Much of the OI literature is rooted within the discipline of psychology, involving the ‘significant psychological linkage between the individual and the organization, whereby, the individual feels a deep-self-defining affective and cognitive bond with the organization as a social entity’ (Edwards, 2005: 227). The dominant theoretical strand within this perspective is Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory (SIT). The core tenet of SIT is that individuals define themselves into social categories and this necessarily involves comparison with other social groups as part of the process of categorization; when in a social group members aim to ensure that this category provides them with a sense of positive identity vis a vis other social groups. A SIT approach exemplifies three main bases for OI: organizational attractiveness, distinctiveness and salience (Ashforth and Mael, 1998; Dutton et al., 1994). Positive organizational features are associated with boosting the status of employees which in turn improves the organization’s identity and results in OI. Foremost amongst these studies are Dutton and Dukerich’s (1991) and Dutton and colleagues’ (1994) social identity theory inspired examinations of how the external image of the organization impacts on members’ identification to that organization. For Dutton et al. (1994: 240) organizational membership can bestow positive attributes such that employees may feel proud to belong to an organization that has strong socially valued characteristics.

The main limitation of this approach is that the organization is the focus of identification with the danger that other factors that impact upon identifications are ignored or downplayed. As Scott (1997: 492) argues, identifications aligned to various targets can aid an assessment of the increasingly complex and changing attachments that characterize contemporary organizations. More recently quantitative research techniques have been utilized by Foreman and Whetten (2002); George and Chattopadhyay (2005) and Hillman et al. (2008) to measure multiple sources of employee identifications in organizations. In spite of these studies, leading theorists in the field of OI have concluded that issues of multi-identifications are severely under-developed (Sluss and Ashforth, 2008). These factors together with the adoption of quantitative techniques to measure OI and to identify causal links between OI with a range of organizational outcomes such as commitment (Foreman and Whetten, 2002) and citizenship behaviour (Dutton et al., 1994) has led critical organizational theorists to observe that much of this research is dominated by a technical/functionalist stance (Alvesson et al., 2008: 13).

Alvesson et al. (2008) urge researchers to adopt a more critical reading of the research into this area, viewing identification as a complex and fluid process which can involve multiple identificatory frames beyond the organization. Thus the existing OI research requires further development to address a number of omissions. Firstly, within the identifications literature, the organization is privileged as the predominant source of identification. As Ashforth et al. (2008: 360) note ‘identification with the organization has garnered the lion’s share of attention but other loci -particularly the team, workgroup, and the subunit, role relationships, and the occupation and career–offer tremendous potential’. Secondly, this has meant that identifications around the nature of work itself have been under-researched compared to research on identification with other aspects (Sluss and Ashforth, 2008: 807). As Barley and Kunda (2001) note organizational theorists have too frequently ignored the nature of work in their explanations. This is in comparison with sociologists of work who have long acknowledged the potential joy of work itself and for work to provide workers with a positive sense of self-identity (Leidner, 2006; Thompson and Findlay, 1999). From an OI perspective, as even advocates such as Ashforth et al. (2008: 339) admit, there is still much to learn about the reciprocal nature of identifications and meaning of work. Thirdly, and somewhat ironically given the influence of SIT, the relational dimension of identifications is often under-played and ‘adopts an individualistic bias’ (Scott et al., 1998: 309). Within the contemporary workplace, social relations revolve around co-workers but increasingly, particularly in a service sector context, interactions with customers. Korczynski (2009: 963) has implored sociological studies of front-line service work to pay more consideration to the worker-customer relationship and specifically to address the nature of these relations. Finally, the broader socio-economic and organizational context has also been neglected within the OI literature. Researchers have tended to concentrate on a micro focus without situating identifications to organizations within broader contextual factors. As a consequence a large proportion of the literature tends to address just one level of analysis (Kreiner et al., 2006: 333).

Our assessment of the well-being and OI literature highlights a number of opportunities for further development. The well-being literature is dominated by a prescriptive approach–the under-lying premise of these prescriptions being that happy workers will be productive and hence employee well-being leads to improved organizational performance. The OI literature also has a number of limitations; specifically this literature gives primacy to employees’ identification with their organization but underplays the multiple factors and different mechanisms of employee identification. Neither literature develops critical and contextual assessments of the reasons why organizations may, or may not, wish to promote identifications and how they attempt to pursue happiness and well-being–for example through normative mechanisms of control. Consequently, these two literatures ignore the examination of power relations in organizations.

To address these issues we adopt a sociological explanation for employees’ identifications with ‘happiness’. A relational sociology approach as outlined by Emirbayer (1997) seeks to focus sociological analyses on issues of context and process with an aim to develop explanation without resorting to structural determininism or voluntarism. As such there is a concern to emphasize agency within explanations but to place agential action within their structural contexts. Specifically the article draws on insights from a relational sociology of organizations (Mutch et al., 2006: 622) with respect to two core features. Firstly, a relational analysis recognizes and engages with connections both within and across organizations and with their wider contexts to address concerns over how organizational action is understood and situated. With respect to our study, a relational analysis takes into account the external organizational context including how the local labour market, market strategy and competitive relations help explain why the organization pursued employee happiness. Secondly, a relational analysis identifies the importance of an institutionally grounded approach which conceives of the constraining and enabling character of social structures and the prospects of agency on the part of social actors. We acknowledge the interplay of management practices and employee agency in relation to examining identifications. As Scott et al. (1998) note, processes of identification operate as a duality in that they are shaped through the interaction of agency and structures. Management practices play a significant role in shaping employees’ responses to the organization, who in turn recognize the importance of power relations. This study identifies the influence of normative controls especially the promotion of reciprocal social relations in the workplace. We draw on the work of Gouldner (1960) and Reed (2001) on power and trust to explore these interactions. An examination of the mechanisms of identification illustrates the interplay between the broader external context, internal management practices and employee agency in explanations of employee happiness. Our study represents a unique qualitative case study of the interacting mechanisms which led to positive employee identifications. Conceptually, our contribution adds to the study of OI by illustrating the importance of emphasizing organizational practices as situated and contextualized and by examining the interplay between social structures and actors in accounts of employee happiness.

Case description and research methods

The research is an in-depth exploratory, qualitative case study of VoiceTel (a pseudonym), a multi-client call-centre providing personalized message and reception services to a range of businesses across the UK. VoiceTel is a family-owned and managed firm that was set up by a brother and sister–Laura and Tim. Since its inception in 2000, VoiceTel has grown rapidly from just four employees to 97 at the time of the research in 2007. It has won many business awards for its ‘high performance’ and enjoys a leading market position within outsourced reception services. At least in part this is due to the competitive advantage offered by the process technology developed by the firm. When a call is received, the receptionist’s screen automatically displays a range of information on the client so they know for whom they are taking the call, who is available to take calls and other relevant information. Employees re-direct the call or take a message and e-mail, text or fax it to the client. Staff have approximately 40 dedicated clients and every receptionist is encouraged to get to know them through an initial set-up call which introduces VoiceTel to each new customer, to develop a rapport by talking about themselves, and to establish the type of service the client will require. There are no scripts or standardized practices governing any aspects of the receptionists’ interactions with the clients. The client base was extremely diverse. Some clients require a straightforward answering and message service, whereas others provide detailed directions on how they want their receptionist to emotionally respond to their customers. Work is organized into teams of four with a team leader who adopts a supportive mentoring role. Receptionists are expected to answer calls without letting them ring over, but if a specific receptionist is busy calls are re-routed to another team member. There is no electronic monitoring of calls and no targets for call-handling times. Therefore, although the nature of work is characteristic of a call-centre–integrated telephone and computer technology and the entering and retrieval of information to manage service interactions (Taylor and Bain, 1999) the experience of work has many distinct features which are not associated with traditional high-volume call-centres. Instead work at VoiceTel is reflective of Frenkel’s (2005: 358) model of ‘mass customized services’ which emphasizes the prioritizing of quality and value added services which rely on employee discretion when dealing with customers.

The research approach was exploratory and iterative. A qualitative case study was chosen because of the importance of developing a holistic understanding which took account of context (Yin, 2003). Semi-structured interviews were the main method of data collection. These were conducted with 66 respondents (75% of the workforce): three senior managers (including the owners), 48 receptionists and 15 support staff. All of the receptionists are female, two senior managers are male and one female and all the support staff are female apart from two male IT managers. The average length of interview with receptionists was 49 minutes, all were digitally recorded and transcribed. The interview sought to explore a wide range of themes reflecting the experience, content and management of work as well employees’ attitudes to their employer including sources of identification. In addition, periods of observation provided valuable insights into the nature of work and the workplace culture. Firstly, prior to the commencement of the field-work one of the research team ‘shadowed’ a receptionist for the day to gain an insight into the work process. Secondly, the research team spent some time observing how receptionists handled calls before the interviews commenced and the third aspect involved the focused observation of the recruitment assessment day–one of the researchers attended this and observed the discussions which led to the hiring of successful candidates. All three members of the research team conducted interviews.

The data analysis iterated between concepts from the literature and the themes emerging from the research over a number of phases. The first phase of analysis involved manually coding a sample of interviews to generate broad themes to develop a thematic map of the main categories evident in the data set. Next, all of these broad themes were categorized into codes and grouped together using the software package Nvivo in order to help manage the data. After this categorization of data, further rounds of manual analysis proceeded in order to relate the codes to concepts from the literature. As Corbin and Strauss (2008: 66) stress, coding involves

interacting with the data (analysis) using techniques such as asking questions about the data, making comparisons between the data, and in doing so deriving concepts to stand for that data, then developing those concepts in terms of their properties and dimensions.

The final stages of analysis involved identifying different mechanisms of identification and sought to identify similarities and differences across the data set so as to delineate between the sources of these identifications in terms of the organizational value system, the nature of work and social relations in the workplace. We would acknowledge that many features of the study are unique and we would not claim empirical generalization.

The pursuit of happiness: reciprocity and normative controls

VoiceTel was striking in the degree of happiness reported by employees–60 employees out of 63 (not including the senior management) interviewed expressed positive feelings about their work and workplace in the following ways; 28 referred explicitly to their ‘happiness’ at work, and a further 32 claimed to ‘love their job’ or expressed positive views about VoiceTel, such as describing it as ‘a brilliant place to work’. As noted previously, the aim of this research is not to measure the degree of employee happiness, nor, do we assume that happiness is an enduring emotional state, but to understand why employees represented their working experiences using these terms. Our relational analysis involves taking employee agency seriously whilst at the same time searching for explanation by examining the connected contexts which inform agency. One such aspect of context is the workplace and how this was shaped by the owners’ attempts to promote happiness through the development of a specific set of norms and values associated with reciprocity which were supported through normative controls. As Kunda (1992) notes, normative controls involve organizations promoting employee identifications such that they will internalize organizational values and engage with and commit to the organization. In this setting, the employers promoted the ‘norm of reciprocity’ (Gouldner, 1960)–the norm establishes configurations of rights and obligations based on the normative principle of mutuality. As Reed has identified (2001: 204) this involves the complex balancing of control and trust through the institutionalization of power relations in legitimizing authority. We show how normative controls formed the back-drop for trust relations to develop such that the norm of reciprocity led to stable, coherent and mutual social relations within the workplace. Further, we consider how these norms and values were both commensurate with VoiceTel’s market and business strategy and other important external contexts such as the local labour market and alternative potential employers.

Due in part to a technological innovation, VoiceTel enjoyed a leading market position within the high-quality niche of outsourced reception services. But the core focus of competitive advantage was the quality of the service provided. Indeed the business idea on which the organization was established emanated from the poor service Tim experienced when he ran his own business. As such, VoiceTel’s core values were to promote a high-quality service whereby receptionists cared for the businesses they worked for. To foster a culture of quality service, the owners identified the importance of having a ‘happy’ workforce. Ironically, neither Tim nor Laura had previously employed staff, nor had they had previous management training, instead they reported that VoiceTel’s practices were based on the ‘best bits’ of organizations which they had previously worked for. As Laura commented, the espoused aim was to create a business where employees ‘genuinely wanted to come to work’ and identified with the values of VoiceTel,

It comes down to the caring thing. What people say they take away from the assessment days is the fact that, you know, we firmly believe that if you’re going to spend eight hours working somewhere then you might as well enjoy it.

The promotion of reciprocal relations was the cornerstone of the approach to people management. By caring for employees and valuing their work, in turn employees would care for the organization by providing high quality service to their customers. To ensure that employees were responsive to the provision of high-quality customer service, employees were recruited and selected on the basis that they would ‘go the extra mile’. Features of normative control were thus evident in the recruitment and selection of employees. As many other studies have discussed, the culture was shaped and sustained through the selection of employees on the basis of value congruence (for example, Callaghan and Thompson, 2002; Grugulis et al., 2000). Laura noted,

What mistakes I made when I recruited people for their skills and not their attitude … if somebody walks in and they’ve got the right attitude, I will take them on, even if they’ve never seen a computer in their lives or can’t type.

Normative controls were further enhanced via a policy of ‘recruiting a friend’ which served to ensure that potential employees had prior knowledge of the organization and value system. As Laura acknowledged this ensured ‘it’s own sort of quality control’. Furthermore, observation of an assessment day revealed that staff spent time with potential recruits in order to evaluate whether the candidate will ‘fit in’ to the culture. Once recruited there is a probation period during which new staff have to demonstrate that they can complete work tasks as well as fitting in to the team. This period starts when all new recruits are taken to lunch by the owners and personal details elicited (for example, partners’ and children’s names) to ‘get to know’ employees better and to transmit the reciprocal values of the organization. A range of Human Resource Management perks and practices have been developed to promote reciprocal relations. The average salary was approximately £15,500 at the time of the study, with annual performance reviews. Laura had researched local wages to ensure that pay compared favourably with similar work in the local labour market. Additionally, holiday provision is comparatively good and there is a private healthcare plan. Informal practices were developed to communicate that each member of staff was valued and appreciated; these included one-off bonus payments such as that occasion when £50 notes were attached to the underside of receptionists’ chairs. Staff are given Easter eggs, Valentine’s and Christmas presents and birthdays are celebrated by the whole workforce and VoiceTel’s annual company parties are famously lavish. Alvesson and Willmott (2002: 630) note that group categorization and affiliation are a powerful way of regulating identity, ‘by engendering feelings of belonging and membership, a sense of community, however, contrived can be developed’. As such, even though the workforce was diverse in age, life-cycle position and previous work experience; they were homogenous in terms of their profile as white, working-class females who demonstrated a certain degree of value congruence with that of the organization.

VoiceTel’s values were promoted via various organizational symbols, the management style and practices, including the design of the work environment. The office is spread over two floors of a new office block. The owners’ offices are situated on the second-floor, all offices are glass fronted and they operate an open-door policy for staff. It is a pleasant and relaxed working environment–open-plan, light and airy. The walls are decorated with large modern pictures and receptionists’ desks are adorned with a range of personal artifacts. There is a kitchen on each floor and receptionists can take breaks when there are quiet periods. VoiceTel provides free tea and coffee. Receptionists can wear the clothes they choose and during quiet moments they are free to read books, magazines and to browse the internet. Trust is an essential feature of these reciprocal relations as workers take breaks when it is quiet and there is an ‘honesty box’ for the consumption of chocolate. The absence of the types of direct and electronic controls usually associated with call-centres and the fact that team leaders were supportive such that team members reported the freedom to develop their own identities led to a relaxed workplace. This had partly been facilitated by the careful selection of team leaders who were overwhelmingly described as ‘approachable’ and ‘open’.

The emphasis on normative controls over more traditional forms of bureaucratic and technological controls could be understood in relation to the market position and strategy of VoiceTel which emphasizes quality rather than quantity in service delivery. In this sense VoiceTel sought to ensure employees share the values of the organization and identify with organizational objectives so that they would ‘go the extra mile’ for customers rather than adopting a strategy based on quantity and efficiency. This was commensurate with VoiceTel’s market leader position which in turn offered a relatively stable external business context. These factors help to explain why the pursuit of employee happiness fitted with the organization’s strategy and the importance of situating and contextualizing organizational action. In this context, VoiceTel’s owners engaged in identity regulation based on a number of organizational practices which sought to select the ‘appropriate employee’ who would share the values of the organization, transmitted and promoted the norm of reciprocity in how employees were socialized into the organization, and how they were subsequently managed. However, this only represents one side of the explanation for employee happiness and it is now important to turn to the three mechanisms which informed employees’ identifications.

Identificatory mechanisms

This section now focuses attention on employees’ views by examining their agential capacity and responses to the owners’ ‘pursuit of happiness’. Significantly, we identify that the three key mechanisms of employee identification related to the organizational value system, social relations in the workplace and the nature of work.

The organizational value system

Unsurprisingly given the attempt to promote a ‘happy’ workplace through normative controls, many of the employees reported how their identification to the organization emanated from VoiceTel’s distinct value system. As reflected by Joan,

I think the values here are a bit different, they [employer] don’t treat their staff as just like money makers if you know what I mean, they really want you to do well, they want you to be happy.

These views were specifically evident for employees when VoiceTel was compared to their previous employers as Tanya noted,

Interviewer: Compared to your last employer, why is this one different?

Because they care basically–about the individual and about the teams as a whole. You know that you can come into work and you know that you can be happy in your job, and if you are not happy then you know that you can say something and that they’ll sort it out.

An important dimension in this study, alongside the way the owners sought to shape the internal organizational context, is how the broader external context also shaped employees’ views of VoiceTel. Many employees had previously been employed in a high-volume, target driven and tightly controlled call-centre, ‘Call-Com’, which was located within the same local labour market. Compared to the employment practices at Call-Com, VoiceTel was considered to represent a completely different type of work experience for working-class female workers. As Libby explains,

I worked at CallCom it was very much target focused … And then coming here was so nice, cos it was so relaxed. Everybody was so friendly, and like Tim and Laura, you didn’t call them Mr and Mrs, you’d call them Tim and Laura which was great [she laughs]! And they were so approachable and you didn’t feel as though you were speaking to the directors, you just felt as though you were speaking to someone worked here. So it was much more relaxed, an easy-going atmosphere.

Further, as Caitlin stresses, although there were ‘perks’ at CallCom, such as gym membership which she described as ‘golden hand-cuffs’, these were not enough to compensate for the content and experience of work.

I worked at CallCom before and I wanted to slit my wrists [she laughs] … I hated it … they give you like free gym and stuff like that, but I mean if you really hate it then … well to go the gym for half an hour after work ain’t going to make you feel any better [she laughs]. So I left.

The close proximity of CallCom and the constant comparisons employees made about their experience in the two workplaces suggests that CallCom represented an important source of dis-identification. Previously dis-identification has been used to examine how employees respond to normative controls which seek to manipulate identities (Fleming and Spicer, 2003) within the same organization. It emphasizes the importance of the construction of ‘other’ as a counterpoint of identification within organization. In the context of the research presented here, the ‘other’ relates to CallCom. In some cases, employees struggled to equate the labour process at VoiceTel with the traditional representation of work at call-centres. As Tanya notes,

I think that people on the outside would say like it [VoiceTel] is a call-centre, but I don’t feel like it is a call-centre. I went for a job at ‘CallCom’ ages ago … and THAT is like a call-centre, they have like boards up around and you are like in your little pod … I don’t even like people saying that it [VoiceTel] is an answering service, well it is … but we are more … we are like their receptionists, we are somebody who works for them really, it is not as if we are just saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and that is it. I don’t think that it is fair to say that we are a call-centre or just an answering service.

For VoiceTel’s owners, CallCom represented a valuable contrast to the approach to work they had developed. Additionally, for employees, VoiceTel’s practices were marked out as distinct and much more favourable compared to the previous employment experiences of the receptionists. This point of comparison was a significant feature of employees’ knowledgeability when assessing their organizational realities and the presence of the negative ‘other’ goes some way to explaining the resoundingly positive responses of VoiceTel employees. As Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) conceptualization of agency highlights, there is an iterational dimension to agency as actors reflect on past experiences as well as a practical-evaluative element which entails an evaluation of the present (and the projective aspect based on the future). In this study, for many employees who previously worked at CallCom their views of VoiceTel were shaped by these past experiences, but also there was evidence of a practical-evaluative perspective as employees’ identifications rested on the sense of shared glory and success of VoiceTel’s achievements, especially the business and technological innovation which led to its leading market position,

Yeah I think it is an amazing thing that they have thought up really. The whole system, the whole nature of it is a brilliant idea. The technology as well the whole thing is clever. I think it is exciting that it is growing. I want to see it carry on and be as successful as it can be. (Trudie)

As Dutton and Dukerich (1991) and Dutton et al. (1994) have noted, positive organizational features impact on employees’ identification. The success of the organization provided a range of material benefits and perks as well as long-term employment security. For Renee the organizational emphasis on valuing employees’ contribution was reflected in the material benefits which VoiceTel shared with the employer,

It is a generous company, if they receive profits, they believe in passing that down to you, cos they believe that you are the reason why they have got these profits … I was here just over a week and a half, and we all came into work and there was a £50 note taped underneath everybody’s chair, cos they had had good profits, and I was like, ‘Bloody hell, I have never known this’. And shortly after that we had a big meeting, and we had a pay rise which was another thank you, and I thought my God I have only just joined this company and I am being treated like a full member of the team straight away … but everybody had it, and everybody had this rise … so I tell people that it is a generous company, um … it is just a happy place.

It is important to note that the shadow of CallCom loomed large in the evaluations of those employees who had previously worked in a traditional call-centre context and this is consistent with the ‘iterational dimensions’ of agency. However, the strength of identifications to the organizational value system could also be explained because these values were not just espoused by the owners, but were consistent with management practice in the way employees were treated. As such the norm of reciprocity went beyond the realm of mere rhetoric and related to employees’ experiences within the organization. The second mechanism of identification which emphasized reciprocity was social relations in VoiceTel.

Social relations

It was the clear intention of the owners to engender a spirit of reciprocity within the workplace such that when employees were valued and cared for they in turn would reciprocate these values in their interactions with their clients, which would ultimately benefit the organization. As Libby explained,

They (VoiceTel) provide a good service. They care for the clients and also the way they care for us. I have never known a company like it.

We characterize these social relations as tripartite in nature–involving the organization, the team and the clients they worked for. However, what is perhaps surprising is the ‘thickness’ or depth of the social relations which emerged. All of the employees interviewed spoke positively about the owners and how the reciprocal culture succeeded in making receptionists feel cared for. The personal and informal management style made them feel that management were ‘human’ as discussed below,

It’s just little things that they do to show that they do care, I think that they do care as people … A lot of companies you are just a number, or a name, you are not a person, but I feel that here you are a person, you are an individual and you are appreciated for what you do. (Andrea)

There is no comparison [with previous employer], the bosses are really different, the bosses here are so approachable and so human, and I am not saying that for the interview. (Audrey)

In particular, the majority of employees appreciated the direct communication with owners and the way in which the management team acknowledged the contribution of employees to the success of VoiceTel, as Esther noted,

I really do respect Laura, Tim and Chris [the MD] … respect everything that they do, respect the way that they treat us, and vice versa, we treat them with the same respect they treat us with … I don’t feel as though they are my bosses, I feel as though I work alongside them … They don’t view themselves as being any higher or better than anybody else … and it is genuine, and you know that when they say thank you, they genuinely mean it … I mean here, day in day out, it is constant praise and thanks and that goes a long way, a hell of a long way, and anybody who says that they can live without it are liars [laughs].

The fact that the organization was relatively small, the owners knew the names of all the employees and pursued a management style based on personal relations conveyed a view of management as approachable and supportive. As Reed (2001) highlights, the norm of reciprocity can mask power relations central in the employment relationship. However, as the following extract identifies, employees were acutely aware of the structural relations of power between the employer and workers, as Grace noted,

I always say that it is a brilliant place to work, cos everyone’s the same, you don’t feel like there is a hierarchy here at all, even though there obviously is there has to be managers … you have to have that cos that is how their team functions, but you don’t feel like that.

The quote highlights that although employees responded positively to management’s personal approach, they were also knowledgeable about the power relations within the employment relationship. As such, the management approach of the owners was appreciated by employees for developing a humanized workplace, however, this did not mean that they were unaware of power relations.

Values of trust and reciprocity were also evident in the way in which teamworking developed at VoiceTel. Teams are organized to allow individual team members to take short breaks and to cover for each other at time when there are no calls waiting. As Christina noted, this approach worked because employees felt a sense of identification to the team and because it relayed the message that receptionists were trusted to manage themselves,

If you are missing your calls, your team members are going to get them, so why should they have smoke coming out of their fingers when you are sat there with a cup of tea and a biscuit, and just letting them go … And that is what I think you don’t find it happening because everyone is loyal to the team.

Additionally, many receptionists spoke of how social relations with their team members was a source of support both inside and outside of work,

I love the girls I work with, we have such a laugh. And we know when to work and there’s time for fun and time for working, got the social side of it, you know. (Nathalie)

You don’t wake up in the morning and think ‘Oh my God, work!’ It is more like you can get up and see your friends and working in between if you see what I mean, because we all have a giggle on our team, we all have a good laugh but we get our work done. (April)

As well as the social relations with team mates, an unanticipated finding was the extent of the social relationships developed between receptionists and their clients. There was a gendered dimension to these relations such that receptionists used maternal and familial terms to describe their feelings towards their clients,

They [the clients) are your babies! And that’s a maternal instinct, that’s what you do think that it is … I mean we are very personal with the clients, we send them cards when they are getting married, or when they are ill and all that. (Elsie)

They’re [the clients] just like your family in some cases. They’ll just ring you up or, you know, if they’re having a bad day they’ll just email and just say I’m having the worst day ever, and you just email them back and just cheer them up. (Melissa)

Although the selection process identified employees who had a high customer service ethic this does not go the whole way to explaining the degree of identification receptionists had to their clients. For us, the explanation rests on the nature of worker-customer relations which in this context provided the scope and space for receptionists to negotiate the service relationship directly with their clients. As Korczynski (2009) notes, explanations for positive associations with customers relate to the power relations between the two parties. Significantly, at VoiceTel employees were afforded a high degree of autonomy in the service offer such that they were able to negotiate the level of service delivery with their clients. Consequently, the power relations which emerged were more nuanced than in traditional settings, where management prescribe and control these relations. For example, some receptionists reported how they were sent Christmas and birthday presents by clients, many were invited to workplace social events, and some even developed into close personal friendships,

I am quite close to some of my clients, so I see them as friends shall we say, so I feel like I am letting them down if I don’t give them a good service … I am very protective of my clients, and if I am away for the day, I know that maybe they wouldn’t get the service that I gave them, that would make me feel a bit uneasy. (Ella)

One of my clients sent in a bottle of perfume, not just for me but one for each of the four girls on the team, that is how much they love what VoiceTel does for them. And it reciprocates, we love working for them and they love us working for them. It is like a different world, you step into VoiceTel and it is a different world. (Melissa)

Social relations in the workplace which built on care and trust and promoted reciprocity led employees to perceive of VoiceTel as a different type of organization, enhancing their identifications with its goals. Undoubtedly, normative controls play an important role in understanding the nature and shaping of these workplace relations, however, employees also demonstrated their capacity for making informed assessments about their employer and clients. The depth of feeling employees reported for some of their clients indicates that these relations developed independently and autonomously from employer prescriptions and this differentiates VoiceTel from many other workplaces. In this sense, the organization provided a structure and context which enabled employees to demonstrate their agency through participation in, and construction of, deep and reciprocal social relations.

Nature of work

Another significant mechanism of identification in this study relates to the nature of work itself; the content, organization and management of work within a call-centre setting. As noted above, employees were afforded much more autonomy and discretion in the relationships with clients than is witnessed in the majority of interactive service work (see Taylor and Bain 1999; Taylor et al., 2002). As employees were able to negotiate the nature of the service provision directly with their different clients, receptionists demonstrated a high degree of emotional dexterity reflective of Bolton’s (2005) concept of ‘emotional management’ (see Jenkins et al., 2010). The varied nature of the client base demanded different emotional displays; some clients required receptionists to be ‘bubbly’, ‘chatty’ with an enthusiastic telephone manner, whereas other clients such as solicitors and accountants required a more sober, reserved and mature manner. Some clients engaged in counselling and personal advice and required receptionists to be caring and empathetic and employees had the space to develop close working relationships with the clients who required that level of service. As Dana explained,

You sort of have to switch from being in a solicitors office one minute to being in a clinic the next, yeah you have to treat everyone differently. It’s just, I don’t know how to explain it, you’ve got to remember, for like a solicitors, you might have someone phoning up about like a parent had died and their will and things, and you have just got to be sympathetic, to things like that, but then other companies, like events companies, you know that you can be jolly with them.

In turn, receptionists reported being highly satisfied with the varied and interactive nature of work at VoiceTel,

I wouldn’t want to lose that interaction with people across the country, with different types of work, with people calling up with different queries, it is the variety! … when you are taking the calls, you are in the middle of Norfolk, and then next you are in the middle of Sussex, and then up in the highlands of Scotland, and you are all over, and just speaking to people, interacting with people, not on a face to face basis but on the phone. (Naomi)

Being able to have the time to provide a quality service imbued the work as being meaningful and varied and the ability to ‘go the extra mile’ was something which was associated with job satisfaction,

Yeah I get a great satisfaction out of this, somebody is trying to contact somebody and you do more than you need to, to try to solve it for them and to do it. (Anna)

This degree of discretion exercised by receptionists translated that they were trusted to use their judgement,

You have to use your initiative if your clients send you updates, you have to take that on yourself, to organize everything … faxes and certain things like that come through it is up to you to sort your ones out, you don’t get watched or anything like that, it is up to you. (Kirsty)

Trust-based workplace relations meant that employees were able to develop meaningful relations with their clients, as Ruby noted,

You don’t feel like someone is on your back all the while, obviously, you are all being monitored but you know nobody is standing over you … They [owners] leave you to develop a friendship, a relationship with your clients and I think that is one of the things that makes us quite unique. Like we are not a call-centre just going blahhh.

This is consistent with Holman’s (2002: 45) research on the well-being of call-centre staff which revealed that control over how staff talk to customers and how they do their work task was more important to employees than control over when a call is taken. The opportunity to exercise control over service interactions imbued employees with a sense of value which as Ruth explained, conveyed that their work was more akin to the work of professionals,

I think VoiceTel offers a professional service … the way that we have been taught to answer the phone, the whole concept of the company portrays a more professional image than if you came in here and saw us all sitting here in our jeans, and you know, our tracksuit and things like that. I think when you come in here you get a shock if you didn’t know the way that we work. From the way that we are, we are not a sort of face to face company, we are … a phone to phone company really, and I think that that professionalism is here.

The nature of work, the degree of control employees were able to exercise over the service delivery and how they were able to manage relations with clients conferred employees with a positive sense of meaning and value. This is not to suggest that employees were unaware or unreflexive of the power relations of their interactions with employer and clients. As well as acknowledging the power asymmetries within the ‘norm’ of reciprocity (Reed, 2001) it is also important to recognize the knowledgeabilty of employees who were capable of judging and discerning VoiceTel from other employers.

Overlapping identifications

VoiceTel’s organizational structure is common in service industries; employees do not just work for their employer, but also for a range of clients. Therefore the nature of the employment relationship is more complex than that of organization and employee. However, what seems to be unusual in this case is that the relationships between company, clients and workers were not seen as being in conflict by employees (Rubery et al., 2004). One explanation for this is that the ‘norm of reciprocity’ (Gouldner, 1960) influenced how employees’ identifications to the organization, their team-mates and clients were perceived as mutually reinforcing. As Ruth noted,

I don’t think that they conflict, cos you work for VoiceTel, the team is a part of that, and then the clients are a part of your team, so they all link into each other.

The interviews sought to interrogate if employees could prioritize these identifications, however, most felt that the relationships which developed to the organization, the team and the clients overlapped. However, it is important to note that the receptionists framed these relations within the context of the organization–as such, VoiceTel was identified as the first target in their identifications but with the teams and their clients creating a balanced set of relations. As Kathleen and Esther indicates,

We work for VoiceTel, we do what VoiceTel wants us to do, but we also do what the clients want us to do, but we also do what fits with the team as well. So it’s a natural fit, it’s not anything that is forced, it is not anything that is uncomfortable, it is just really, really natural.

To be honest, you can’t really put it in order cos they all go together … the three of those are a priority, VoiceTel the company that I work for first and foremost for me, the team are my girls, so if anyone is unhappy we are all unhappy and there will be problems with our clients. Clients are the people that pay our wages, they pay VoiceTel, if we didn’t have clients we wouldn’t be working … it is very, very hard to put them in a 1, 2, 3 category. They really are all on the same … they are balanced. (Esther)

The over-lapping nature of these identifications was rooted in the norm of reciprocity which informed management practices in relation to how employees were managed, rewarded and valued, as well as the way work was organized, controlled and designed such that employees exercised a high degree of discretion in their relations with clients. As such, the three identificatory mechanisms reported here were anchored within the normative values of reciprocity. These informed employees’ responses and interpretations of VoiceTel and demonstrates that employees were active agents in promoting co-operative workplace relations.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to propose and exemplify a relational sociological approach to the study of employee happiness in organizations. This approach departs from the existing well-being and identifications literature by emphasizing the importance of two broad features: firstly, assessing organizational practice by examining organizations within their wider contexts to address concerns over how organizational action is situated and secondly, a relational analysis conceives of the constraining and enabling character of social structures on the potential for agential capacity. Our approach in this article thus acknowledges the inter-play of management practices and employee agency on processes of identification such that identifications are shaped through the interaction of agency and structures (Scott et al., 1998). A situated and contextualized assessment draws attention to the reasons why VoiceTel ‘pursued happiness’ and how this was supported by a number of contextual features such as the nature of the business as being family-owned, small and successful, and having a unique technological invention which helped make it a market leader. In this context, the pursuit of a happy workforce was commensurate with the business strategy of high-quality service provision. Relatedly, this business strategy allowed the employers to focus predominantly on normative controls and shape an internal labour process which afforded employees much higher levels of discretion than is usually evident in this type of work. Additionally, another significant contextual dimension in this study was the presence locally of a traditional high quantity call-centre which had employed a number of employees previously. This organization provided an important counter-point to the management approach at VoiceTel. CallCom was constructed as ‘other’ and provided a crucial reference point for employee dis-identification and informed aspects of some employees’ positive identifications to the value system at VoiceTel.

An assessment of the mechanisms of identification illustrates how the interactions between management practices and employee agency provide an explanation for the degree of workplace ‘happiness’. Happiness was constructed within VoiceTel–the owners were instrumental in establishing and sustaining an organizational culture based on the values of care and trust to promote deeper social relations within the workplace. Identity regulation was evident in the recruitment and selection of workers who demonstrated a positive disposition to customer care. In addition, the promotion of norms was apparent in the way people were managed, the development of HR perks and practices and in the design and organization of the labour process. The pursuit of employee happiness was a deliberate strategy evidenced by the way employers promoted an organizational value system based on reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity was a way of legitimizing authority and developing stable workplace relations. Therefore, the exercise of normative controls are an important dimension in understanding how reciprocal relations were constructed and how these values permeated the structure and culture of the organization. Reed (2001) has noted that the norm of reciprocity can serve to obscure power relations within the employment relationship. However, it is also important to recognize employees’ agential capacity in the way they aligned their interests through their organizational identifications. Receptionists at VoiceTel recognized that they ‘did what the company wanted’ but also that this was positively related to the needs and preferences of their clients and of themselves. As Reed (2001: 206) points out, although there is an irreducible element of power dependence or control in all trust relationships, it is also important to acknowledge that ‘social actors can and do play a crucial role in creating new combinations of compliance and commitment, power and autonomy, control and trust’. Hence, the co-operative relations developed within this setting relate to agents’ respective capacities to make informed decisions about their organization.

As such, as organizations utilize normative controls to elicit employee commitment through ensuring that employees identify with their organization–this study investigates the mechanisms which informed employees’ identification to VoiceTel. This assessment illustrated that the three key mechanisms of identification relating to the organizational value system, tripartite social relations and the nature of work overlapped and became mutually reinforcing. It was evident that the connected nature of these three mechanisms of identifications informed the high degree of ‘happiness’ reported by the workforce. This qualitative assessment of the mechanisms of identification confirm aspects of the current literature on OI such as the importance of the positive image of the organization (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Dutton et al., 1994), but also extends current understandings of converging mechanisms of identification. Following from some of the limitations of the existing OI research raised by Ashforth et al. (2008), Kreiner et al. (2006) and Sluss and Ashforth (2008) we have sought to highlight the importance of situating identifications within their organizational and wider contexts and to take into consideration job characteristics and social relations at work. Additionally, this study illuminates a number of significant factors which were relevant to the specific nature of interactive service work such as the nature of employee/customer relations (Korczynski, 2009). By conceiving of employee identifications as the interaction of both organizational practices and employee agency we can examine more fully how organizations seek to develop practices to enhance identification as well as employees responses to them.

From a relational sociology perspective it is important to take issues of agency seriously and therefore, not just to understand management practices and how this was informed by the broader external context but why employees responded so positively. As Kreiner et al. (2006: 1333) note, ‘Individuals are not merely passive recipients of identities provided to them by social entities. Rather individuals are capable of recognizing the identity implications and demands of organizations, groups, and other social entities’. For the working-class women at VoiceTel, whose expectations of employment were grounded in their previous working experiences and histories which often failed to deliver a meaningful working life, the nature content and management of work were highly significant in how they responded to the organization. The opportunity to undertake decent work and use their discretion and autonomy at work helped to sustain a positive sense of self. Additionally, local labour market conditions, and the comparatively favourable pay and employment terms, also promoted a positive employee orientation to their employer. While we are not able to make comparative statements, gender, class and age appear important dimensions in this study; these relations informed receptionists’ expectations of work, helped to explain how they identified with the reciprocal workplace culture and were evident in their relations with clients.

With respect to the well-being literature, the article endorses Pauuwe (2009) and Guest’s (2002) requests for a more worker-centred and ethically valued HRM in order to promote worker well-being. However, it is important to acknowledge that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is not a strategic goal of the majority of organizations. VoiceTel is a highly unusual case and happiness was pursued because it linked with its strategic context. As such we sound a note of caution; these identifications could be the consequence of temporary balancing rather than a situation which endures. Changes to one of the mechanisms of identification could result in the fracturing of social relations within the workplace. The empirical incidence of employee happiness is rare. However, this also means that when employees report their happiness it is imperative not to dismiss these experiences as being falsely conscious but to critically examine the reasons for such resoundingly positive responses. In our study we have attempted to do so by developing a relational sociological examination of employee identifications which emphasizes the importance of context and the interaction of structure and agency. This examination of the ‘happy workforce’ avoids seeing employees as either manipulated or hoodwinked cultural dupes (Rhodes et al., 2007: 89) such that the reported happiness cannot be explained purely in terms of the effect of attitudinal manipulation through normative controls. Instead, agents interact within structural contexts and demonstrate their knowledgeability and capacity to make assessments regarding the source of their identifications. Employee well-being is too important to be left to economists and psychologists alone. We would hope that a sociological understanding of the mechanisms of employee identifications can help to assess happiness and its explanations more robustly.