Creating internal customer delight: towards improved employment practices for casual workers in the registered clubs industry of New South Wales, Australia

It is argued in this paper that management holds erroneous assumptions about casual employees' affective orientation towards the workplace. Such assumptions allow management to obviate the need for provision of certain employment systems. The research, which provided the basis for this paper, investigated the relevant work context factors associated with casualisation and the effects of casual work arrangements on employee job satisfaction and commitment. A generative methodology, using both quantitative and qualitative methods was used to gather the data. A total of454 casual employees were surveyed: forty-two employees in a sample of 6 clubs within the top 200 registered Clubs in NSW were interviewed, twenty-eight casual employees took part in a pre-test of the questionnaire, and three hundred and eighty four returned questionnaires from a sample of sixteen clubs. Key findings of the research include the observation that casual employees experience varying levels of commitment and satisfaction according to their perceptions of work context factors in their organisation. This implies that casual employees are not homogenous in the way they perceive their work environment, and should not be assumed to be indifferent to their work environment and work opportunities. Therefore, a model of employment systems is proposed that is relevant to the highly casualised enterprise. The model is intended to create equitable work context factors which emphasise opportunities for the entire organisation rather than a 'mythical core'.