Services offshoring: A microfoundations perspective

While services offshoring is increasingly important for the offshoring firms and global value chains, there is limited empirical and theoretical basis in extant research for drawing conclusions on how micro-level employee motivational mechanisms underlie the link between services offshoring strategies and their outcomes, such as organisational performance, capabilities and resources. In this regard, this study employs a microfoundations perspective on services offshoring strategy to explore the role of employee motivation in services offshoring strategy implementation. To address the main research question, I draw on data from an interpretive study of services offshoring in a global electronics firm. The study serves to elaborate a minimal conceptual model which combines extant services offshoring literature, with the processual view of strategy, organisational routines theory and goal framing theory, as lenses to address the role of employee motivation in services offshoring strategy. Overall, the elaborated model a) accounts for services offshoring strategy as a multi-level dynamic process which spans macro-, meso- and micro- levels of analysis, b) delineates the role of employee motivations implementing the intended services offshoring strategy at the micro-level of analysis, and c) provides new insights into the effective use of coordination mechanisms in services offshoring.