The problem of management outsourcing is largely fueling academic and professional literature. This article contributes to the debate by examining the reasons for outsourcing personnel and its impact on the functioning of participating organizations. Based on an empirical study of five consulting firms and hr outsourcing services in their activity portfolios, we estimated the magnitude and depth of this phenomenon. This text gives the first idea of the activities outsourced, the rationale for the reasons, as well as the features of this management option in this particular context.
When scanning hr outsourcing services, we noticed that the concept of outsourcing has been the subject of numerous studies and various definitions. According to a number of authors, this can be defined as the fact of the transfer or acquisition of any activity, product or service and its management, which were previously carried out on their own and which are associated with functions that are still necessary to create a chain of creation. value for the service provider or external provider, and not for its internal awareness, to increase productivity. Focusing on outsourcing in the banking sector, as well as on HR business partnership, it should be noted that outsourcing for a group of companies consists in transferring part of its activities to a third-party company, to a third-party supplier. This third party may receive personnel and equipment from an outsourcing company and undertakes an ongoing commitment to maintain the continuity of services offered to customers.
As with any form of outsourcing related to HR outsourcing that interests us in this article, some argue that before talking about this, the Company asked itself the question “do or buy”.
Thus, the outsourcing of activities must be preceded by a fundamental decision on the issue of “make or buy.” A company that has conducted a thoroughly reviewed review of this issue in order to be able to comment on the positive or negative nature of HR outsourcing considers this position restrictive. In the end, these authors, like many others, managed to convince themselves that outsourcing is “transferring an external organization on a regular basis to personnel activities that were previously carried out within the company (or that the organization has the ability to perform internally).”
We adhere to this synthetic definition when choosing HR solutions, but add that our surveys show that there is no legal basis for outsourcing management, especially in the field of work of temporary agencies. Thus, there is no regular basis for a contract or partnership, and yet organizations indulge this practice of outsourcing staffing. As indicated below, we are concerned about why they make this management option. An analysis of our problem requires a review of the work on the determinants of outsourcing personnel services.
As for the decision, when the activity has low asset specificity, there are many possible suppliers. In this case, the organization may resort to hr outsourcing. But if the activity is based on very specific assets, the organization will have to evaluate and compare the costs of internal sales with the costs of the service provider, but also taking into account the degree of uncertainty, which should be low, be able to make the best decision. On the other hand, when an activity includes not only high specificity of assets, but also high uncertainty, it is necessary to evaluate the frequency. If the action is not practiced frequently, an organization can use a relationship agreement to strengthen relationships with its service provider. However, if asset specificity, uncertainty, and frequency are very high, the organization should avoid outsourcing this activity.
The collected data was processed in two stages. First of all, we performed flat sorting and cross-sorting, which allowed us to obtain summary tables of various trends by sector of activity, HR outsourcing and human resources administration. Then, from an epistemological point of view, the reasons for the outsourcing of various activities, as well as their impact on the functioning of partner organizations, were analyzed. In addition to using descriptive statistics for quantitative data, we present the results in the form of a typology of justification forms, illustrating unified sets with basic remarks; which gives a higher aspect to our preliminary analysis and allows us to better understand the relationships between variables.