engleski

Croatian consumers' and managers' attitudes towards outsourcing - how "soft" outsourcing issues influence enterprises in transition

Outsourcing is one of the trendy management approaches for maintaining/developing competitive advantage. As such it is becoming more and more popular in Eastern European economics as well as in the Western world. It is rare and hard to come across scientific papers that deal with the “ soft” consequences and issues of outsourcing, such as employees’ , managers’ or customers’ perceptions about the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing. It is even more difficult to find reports of this kind in transitional economics such as Croatian. This article deals with a small part of “ soft” outsourcing issues, namely with the fragment of a broad area of human attitudes and perceptions concerning popular trends in management. Precisely, managers’ attitudes about the outsourcing, both as business decision-makers and buyers, are explored. In order to evaluate outsourcing as a positive or negative management approach, attitudes toward outsourcing from a consumer perspective, and attitudes toward outsourcing from a management perspective were explored. The data were collected through a mail survey among a sample of 150 consumers and managers. The results of the research pointed towards two major conclusions. Both consumers’ and decision-makers’ attitudes towards outsourcing are positive. Consequently, companies should not withhold the fact that they use outsourcing or who their outsourcing partners are. Based on these findings we conclude that Croatian companies can view outsourcing as useful management technique.

outsourcing; consumers' attitudes; managers' attitudes

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