Business outcomes of outsourcing: lessons from management research (original) (raw)

Outsourcing has been broadly recognized as an important strategic choice made by companies and other organizations to achieve a wide variety of goals. Many studies have focused on the economic and fi nancial impacts and on the relationship between outsourcers and outsourcees. This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of actual outsourcing outcomes found in management research, including impacts on human capital. Analysis of the evidence on outsourcing in the OECD STAN database (OECD 2011: 1970-2009) shows that both the number of transactions (deals) and their scope (activities involved) have increased constantly during the last 20 years. Over time, outsourcing popularity peaks have coincided with certain trends, such as business process reengineering, strategic focusing on core business, outsourcing/offshoring strategies, shared services and corporate downsizing (e.g. Brunetta and Peruffo 2014). Furthermore, as recent research shows, companies are expeditiously outsourcing non-core business processes and functions in order to maximize their profi ts. Business profi ts can be increased through reducing costs and/or via acquiring external sources of strategic differentiation (e.g. higher-quality raw materials or distinctive expertise/competences able to improve the overall quality of products and services, enabling companies to sell them at higher prices) (De Fontenay and Gans 2008; Gospel and Sako 2010; Angeli and Grimaldi 2010; Doellgast and Gospel 2012; Giustiniano et al. 2014).