Browsing by Author "Kallio, Miia"

The aim of this master's thesis was to clarify employees' views on outsourcing. The main questions of the study were 1) How the employees dealt with the change created by outsourcing and what things they felt important when implementing the change? 2) What kind of organizational questions the employees paid attention to when moving from one organization to another? 3) What kind of management issues the employees brought up in the outsourcing process? and 4) How the employees reflected change while experienced outsourcing? The theoretical foundations of the study were Jack Mezirow's theory of transformational learning and Yrjö Engeström's theory of expansive learning. The management of outsourcing was viewed by John P. Kotter's change management model. Research casted light on transformation and learning on four levels of analysis: on individual, organizational and management levels and on the level of reflection. The target of the study were the outsourced employees, who were moved from a Finnish public corporation to a private ITC organization along with the services they produce. The study material was eleven interviews from the outsourced employees. The study was implemented by fenomenographical theme analysis. The analysis revealed results in all four levels. On the individual level the main results were the importance of systematic and open information, meaning of social and technical integration and the feeling of employee's own control. On the organizational level the move from the public sector to private and all the changes in organizational culture and in fringe benefits were fundamental. Organizational learning was analyzed with expansive learning theory. Expanding was perceived in four dimensions: temporal dimension, spatial dimension, responsibility-moral dimension and developmental dimension. On the management level the actions of one's closest manager was vital, as was the upper management's clear engagement and a shared view of the necessity of a change. In the data was found employees' reflective talking, which was indicating the meaning of the change and which was interpreted from the learning point of view. According to this study, it is possible to identify and analyze reflective talk and that way have information about employees' learning in an organizational change. It was prominent to notice how reflection in the process of outsourcing is extremely versatile and extensive.