academy of management symposium 2004 submission 109… · web viewin addition, individual...
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ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT SYMPOSIUM 2004Putting Work in its Place:
New Perspectives on the Working Time of ProfessionalsShort title: Putting Work in its Place
Submission Number: 10956Chair: Ellen Ernst KossekSchool of Labor & Industrial Relations437 South KedzieMichigan State UniversityEast Lansing, MI 48824(517) [email protected]
Submitter: Alyssa Jill FriedeMichigan State University129 Psychology Research BuildingEast Lansing, MI 48824(517) [email protected]
1. Reshaping Identit(ies): Women and the New Politics of TimePeter Whalley, Loyola University Chicago (Presenter), and Peter Meiksins, Cleveland State
University
2. Time Compression at Work: Implications for Managing the Work-Life BoundaryFrances J. Milliken, New York University (Presenter)
3. Studying the Relationship Between the New Career and Life Balance:Preliminary Results
Douglas T. Hall, Boston University, Ellen Ernst Kossek, Michigan State University, Mary Dean Lee, McGill University, Jon Briscoe, Northern Illinois University (Presenter), and Betzaluz Gutierrez,
Boston University
4. The Role of Human Resource Policies and Systems in the Initiation and Institutionalization of Reduced Workload Initiatives
Alyssa Friede, (Presenter) and Ellen Ernst Kossek, Michigan State University and Mary Dean Lee, McGill University
5. The Role of Managers in Supporting Reduced-Load Work ArrangementsPamela Lirio Dohring (Presenter), and Mary Dean Lee, McGill University,
Margaret L. Williams, Virginia Commonwealth University,Leslie K. Hagen, University of St. Thomas, and Ellen Ernst Kossek, Michigan State University
Key words: Work-Life Integration, Family Friendly Supports, Time, Nontraditional Work Arrangements Time requested: 120 minutesDivisions (in alphabetical order): Careers, Gender & Diversity in Organizations, Human ResourcesAgreement to Participate: We have received email statements from all intended participants agreeing to participate in the symposium.
Abstract
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As professionals are pressured to work longer hours, emerging research suggests a countertrend to change job and life structures to reduce time allocated to work. The forward to Meiksins and Whalley’s (2002) book, Putting Work in its Place, observes that people are “fighting skirmishes, however private they may be, with corporations (if not our very culture) for the right to choose how we will allocate the time of our lives.” This symposium triangulates scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives (career, human resource, organizational, managerial) on this struggle to reshape working time. Presenters will share future research directions and individual and organizational challenges arising when the traditional work paradigm is rejected as individuals choose to reduce workloads and hours and organizations attempt to accommodate them. Meiksins opens the symposium by examining women as the new time radicals and processes of enabling individuals to work less. Milliken considers time compression indicative of new ways that people are conceptualizing and managing time. Three papers are from two major Sloan Foundation studies on reduced workload. Hall and colleagues present new scales that expand work-family integration constructs to include relations with others, self, and community. Dohring and colleagues examine managers’ roles in supporting reduced load. Friede and colleagues consider an under-examined research area: how new work structures link to human resource systems. The symposium will offer valuable insights to researchers seeking to understand new ways of working, and individuals, managers, and organizations struggling to support those who choose to “put work in its place.”
I have received signed statements from all intended participants agreeing to participate in the
symposium.”
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Putting Work in Its Place: New Perspectives on the Working Time of Professionals
Ellen Ernst Kossek, Co-Chair and Alyssa Friede, Submitter
Symposium Overview
It is well documented that professionals are being asked to spend more time on the job
(Golden, 2001). Less research has been conducted on the countertrend of professionals who
desire to change work and life structures to reduce the time they allocate to their jobs (Meiksins &
Whalley, 2002), which is the focus of this symposium. Although growing numbers of professional
individuals desire to restructure their work lives to achieve a greater sense of integration between
work and non-work roles, these changes are not made in isolation as individuals must contend with
pressures from their families, organizations, and society. As Stephen Barley, a major
organizational scholar and the former editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly writes in the
Forward to the book Putting Work in its Place, (Meiksins & Whalley, 2002), people are “fighting
skirmishes, however private they may be, with corporations (if not our very culture) for the right to
choose how we will allocate the time of our lives.” This symposium brings together scholars from
multiple disciplines and perspectives (career, human resource, organizational, managerial) on this
struggle to reshape working time. Presenters will share future research directions and individual
and organizational challenges arising when the traditional work paradigm is rejected as individuals
choose to reduce workloads and organizations attempt to accommodate them.
One of the major reasons that individuals attempt to restructure their working lives is to
achieve greater integration between work and non-work roles. With individuals in the United States
working more hours than ever before (Schor, 2003), many professionals feel that the demands of
their work role are interfering with their ability to have successful and rewarding non-work roles,
such as parenting, serving the community, or fulfilling other personal dreams (Meiksins & Whalley,
2002). Further, responsibilities from non-work roles may be perceived as interfering with
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successful on-the-job performance when organizations expect employees to work excessive hours
and be continuously accessible (e.g., by phone, fax, or email) to address work-related issues. This
work-life conflict that many individuals are experiencing should not be taken lightly. In fact,
research on conflict between work and family roles shows that it is associated with many negative
personal and professional outcomes such as increased depression (Frone, Russell, & Cooper,
1991), psychological distress (Allen, Herst, Bruck, & Sutton, 2000), self-reported poor physical
health (Grzywacs & Marks, 2000), increased alcohol use (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1993) and
decreased life and job satisfaction (Kossek & Ozeki, 1998).
Individuals are beginning to realize the detrimental effects of this conflict and have begun
to take action. In 1999, Becker and Moen found that dual-career couples wanted to work twelve
hours fewer per week than they were currently working, on average. Indeed, many individuals have
begun to “put work in its place” by choosing to work less, but organizations, work structures and
human resource systems have not yet been fully adapted to support this societal change.
Although options such as reduced work-loads, telework, flextime, and job-sharing are among the
creative responses that individuals have taken to reduce work hours and enhance work-life
integration, studies indicate that many organizational cultures do not support new ways of working
and policies often go underutilized (Eaton, 2003).
Greater understanding is needed regarding how people initiate and enact the process of
working less and the concomitant adaptation of career, managerial, human resource, and
organizational systems. The thoughts, feelings, and actions associated with making this choice
have remained unclear and little has been created in the way of “actionable knowledge” for
individuals, managers and organizations. This symposium remedies this issue through in depth
examination of the process of working less. In their presentation, “Reshaping Identit(ies): Women
and the New Politics of Time,” Whalley and Meiksins share findings from their study of technical
professionals working reduced hours discussed in their book, Putting Work in its Place (2002).
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They provide important insights into how women, who have chosen not to work full time, have
restructured and reframed their work and domestic lives in order to find balance in their multiple
identities. They present the advice that these women would offer to others interested in
challenging the status quo of work-life, in both the management of their work and non-work lives.
These women are not simply “superwomen” who are doing it all, they are making deliberate and
conscious choices about how to allocate the time of their life and, in doing so, provide valuable
information to individuals concerned with their own work-life balance and to researchers who are
interested in a deeper understanding of the process of choosing to work less.
Milliken’s presentation “Time Compression at Work: Implications for Managing the Work-
Life Boundary” expands upon the notion of how people spend the time of their life by delving
deeper into how people are experiencing time dilemmas in their life. She discusses “work creep,”
which is the interference of work with family and personal time. In fact, 55% of participants in her
study report that work “crept” into their non-work time, especially because new technology (e.g.,
email, cell phones, fax machines) makes it easier for people to take work home with them. She
discusses the challenges associated with “putting work in its place” when people feel extreme
pressure to work longer hours than ever before, and the boundaries between work and non-work
are blurred due to technological advances.
Hall and colleagues also build upon the ideas presented by Whalley and Meiksins by
discussing how individuals who engaged in a reduced-load work arrangement conceptualized their
careers. That is, while many may believe that those who choose to work reduced-load are not
focused on their long-term careers and/or are not committed to their organizations, this study is the
first to empirically investigate this relationship. This presentation contributes to an understanding
of the how and why people choose to work less by offering an in-depth examination of their career-
related beliefs, values, and plans. They also offer new empirical scales that expand work-family
integration constructs to include relations with others, self, and community.
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These first three presentations focus on the individual and his/her decision to work less
than full time, and how this choice is implemented and enacted. Yet, there must be a realization
that these choices are not made in isolation. An individual’s choice to “put work in its place” must
be made in conjunction with family members, work team members, managers, and human
resource professionals, and work systems. Two papers in this symposium address these
organizational stakeholders in the renegotiation of working time.
Friede and colleagues discuss the role that human resource systems play when individuals
desire to work less. The authors discuss the implementation of alternative work arrangement
policies and practices. Importantly, they focus on how these arrangements are actually arranged
and implemented in organizations, rather than simply focusing only on written organizational policy,
which often does not capture the entire process of assisting employees who choose to work less.
Further, they share the challenges and important lessons learned by human resource professionals
as they attempt to assist increasing numbers of employees who want to “put work in its place.”
Finally, Dohring and colleagues present their findings regarding the role of managers in
supporting reduced-load work arrangements. Again, individuals who choose to work less do not do
so in isolation and direct managers play a vital role in the enactment of reduced-load arrangements
and their success for individuals. By illuminating the role that managers play in the creation,
implementation, and maintenance of these work arrangements, they provide additional insight into
the process by which individuals divide up the time of their life.
Session Format, Audience Participation, and Discussion. We are requesting a 120 minute
session. This amount of time will allow for both research presentations and active audience
engagement. Each presenter will be allotted up to 20 minutes to present their research projects
and pertinent findings (100 minutes maximum). Then in order to encourage maximum audience
participation, Ellen Kossek, who has experience in researching issues related to individual self-
management and managerial and employer support of the work-life relationship, will serve as a
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discussion facilitator. In addition to inviting oral questions at the end of the presentation, notecards
will be distributed that can be written on, so that both oral and written comments can be made.
In sum, the presentations in this symposium provide new perspectives on the work/non-
work interface. They provide interdisciplinary and process-oriented perspectives on how
individuals go about working less, how they redefine their various roles, restructure the
professional and domestic work that they do, the utility of existing formal and informal alternative
work practices and HR policies, how current work force members think about their jobs, their
careers, and their time, and how they interact with various other stakeholders (managers, HR) in
this process. In line with the theme of the 2004 Academy of Management Conference, this
symposium presents valuable “actionable knowledge” for individuals, managers, and human
resource professionals who are all inevitably going to be faced with growing challenges associated
with work-life balance and limiting work hours.
Relevance to Career Division:
This symposium’s focus on new career management strategies and changing work
conditions and role expectations in regard to the countertrend of reduced load and flexible work
arrangements fits well with the Career Divisions’ interest in fundamental research about careers
and the changing influence of careers and career management on individuals and organizations.
Not only has the structure of work changed with the growth of alternative work and career
arrangements, cultural values have shifted with respect to work-family roles and how employees
chose to enact their work and life priorities. This symposium helps address how human resource,
career, and organizational management models and individual expectations are adjusting to these
societal shifts.
Relevance to GDO Division:
This symposium examines issues aligning closely with the interests of the Gender and
Diversity in Organizations Division. The symposium will explore challenging existing assumptions
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about the design or work and non-work structures to widen the spectrum of possibilities for thinking
about and researching the ways in which men and women of varying career and family
configurations enact their career and family roles. For example, the authors of Putting Work In Its
Place, focus on how women are the new time radicals in organizations. The three papers drawing
from the Sloan Foundation reduced workload studies draw on a sample of predominantly high
potential professionals and managers who challenge organizational cultures and managerial and
organizational systems to restructure their work and non-work lives.
Relevance to HR Division:
Human resource (HR) policies have been implemented under traditional management
views of work-family roles, which encourages role segmentation and assumes that the best
employees prioritize work over family. This symposium addresses growing tensions between
formal HR policies designed to help employees balance work and family, shifting informal cultures
and expectations, and the effects of mismatch on outcomes of interest to HR managers and
researchers. Its focus on individual and employer actions to change and alter traditional work
structures, job and family role expectations, and the management of the employment relationship
fits well with the interests of the Human Resources Division. For example, Dohring and colleagues’
paper examines how line managers partner with human resources to implement work life
innovations and the management of work time. Friede and colleagues’ paper focuses specifically
on the role of Human Resource managers in the implementation of alternative work-arrangements.
All of the papers provide important insights for Human Resource managers into the ways that work
can be restructured to respond to growing employee demands to work flexibly while at the same
time foster productivity.
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Reshaping Identit(ies): Women and the New Politics of Time.
Peter Whalley and Peter Meiksins
Introduction
For obvious reasons, it is women who have been the most visible victims of the so-called
time-bind faced by modern families. The creation of two career families, coupled with a reluctance
of men to participate in family work as equal partners, has placed most of the burden on women,
although even in egalitarian families the reduction in total time available for domestic chores has
created a real time shortage. Most of the proposed solutions to this time crisis have been
conventional and predictable. On the one hand there has been a call for the revival of a “traditional
women’s role,” often recast as a glorification of motherhood rather than that of the dependent wife.
On the other, there has been a revival of the servant class, as full-time career parents hire in-house
or commercial caretakers, housekeepers and caterers to take over the domestic chores. Since
Gerson wrote about women’s Hard Choices between career and family (Gerson, 1985), more and
more women have rejected that choice by taking on a “second shift” and embraced the “time bind,”
but relatively little attention has been paid to the processes where those hard choices might be
deconstructed. Either at the level of structure, where questions need to be asked about where
work and family need to be so time demanding. Or at the level of agency where need to examine
more closely what women seek when they want to be “professionals”, or want to be “moms.”
The Study
For our book, Putting Work in is Place (Meiksins and Whalley 2002) we interviewed 127
technical professions who were working reduced hours, two thirds of whom were women. Not all
the women part-timers did so for family reasons nor did the (over sampled selection of) men: one
wanted to make time to be a dancer, another an environmentalist, but it is working mothers who
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have been central to the time crunch debate and it is those we will concentrate on in this
presentation.
We deliberately chose technical professionals to maximize the agency in the workplace
these women possessed. They occupied a strong labor market position; it was the time of the tech
boom and women technical professionals were in additional short supply as companies sought to
maximize affirmative action guidelines for government contracts. If they chose to work part-time it
was clearly because they wanted to, and they were in a better position than most to be able to
bargain for the right to do so. These were also women who had deliberately chosen a non-
traditional occupation. In short, this was a group, though not atypical of a large number of working
women in many respects–middle American, middle income, that had relatively few of the traditional
restrictions on choice that limit women’s action with respect to work and family.
To summarize what we found: these women demanded to be seen as both committed
professionals, and as committed moms, but to maximize their enjoyment of both roles they
reformulated each role to maximize what they saw as the most productive and satisfying
components. These mothers redefined what it means to be a successful technical professional. In
effect, they rejected what Hochschild (Hochschild, 1997) calls “the male world of work” with its
stress on exclusive and unbounded commitment to the workplace. They also rejected the “female
world of unbridled domesticity.” Rather than “making sacrifices,” they speak of opportunities, of
feeling lucky, and of the gratification, they get from both work and family. Theirs is not a lowered or
absent commitment to either work or family, but a different kind of commitment that challenges, at
least implicitly, the conventional politics of time.
Restructuring Work and Professional Identity
In these part-time jobs, women cut down on meetings, used electronic communication to
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work from home, coordinated with colleagues and worked hard to focus on the core components of
the job. They continued to do interesting and important technical work. If having a “career”,
however, implies a commitment to the corporate career ladder, then most of our interviewees have
“jobs,” living very much in the present and seeing it as a part, not the whole of their lives. However,
“job” is a far too limited word to capture these people’s orientation to work. They are committed
professionals, committed if not to their company, then at least to their skills and their occupation. In
some ways, they have an orientation closer to the traditional crafts than that of the corporate
professions. They want to re-design what is meant by having a “career”, to strip it of its necessary
assumption of greedy time demands or organizational ladder climbing. Instead, a career means
being committed to one’s expertise, whether within a corporation or without. They do not want
mere “jobs”, uninteresting work done simply for the pay. They want and have involving, interesting
work, around whose time demands they choose to set distinct boundaries. They identify with their
profession. They talk about having a career. They simply do not accept that this means that it has
to be done the old way; that professions or careers have to be all-absorbing.
To achieve all this they had to negotiate to create jobs that offer them what they want. We
can summarize the advice they would offer women (or men) who wanted to follow them thus: Do
not assume that organizational policy actually reflects what is possible. Find an agreeable
manager. Work with colleagues to solve scheduling problems. Be accessible. Do “face work”. Do
good work. Make yourself a valued employee. Make use of the existing “reasons” to request part-
time work. You’re not alone – talk to others. For those who wanted to reduce work time by working
as independent contractors then they offered this additional advice: Be Available. Do good work.
Develop a reputation. Develop a Network. Minimize non-billable hours.
Reconstructing Domestic Life
If all our part-timers had to redefine what “having a career” meant so that it fit their chosen
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work strategy, the working mothers had the additional task of reconstructing the image of
domesticity. Most were certainly unhappy with what Joan Williams has called the “full
commodification” model—paying to have someone look after children full time and do all of the
housework—at least when it comes to institutionalized daycare (Williams, 2000). However, this
does not mean that they bought into a cultural package of domesticity that would put women back
in the home in a replay of the nineteen fifties. They certainly did not self-identify as “housewives” or
even “homemakers”. Instead were willing to readjust the “frontier of commodification”.
These women focused on their identity as a “mom” and wanting to spend time with their
children. But even here, there was no obvious return to the cult of intensive mothering. We heard
from women who enjoyed parenting, loved it in fact, but did not feel compelled to do it full time.
They felt comfortable, even relieved, sharing some of the responsibilities and leaving their children
with friends, family, or daycare, at least some of the time. They felt they could be perfectly
satisfactory parents without buying into any cultural demand for intensive mothering. Importantly,
we did not hear these women talking about parenting as an obligation and work as self-
gratification, a convention that only feeds into stereotypes of the “selfless” woman and the “self-
fulfilled” male. Repeatedly, we heard them talk about their children in the same terms as they talk
about their work, as a source of intense personal satisfaction. We also heard them say that they
have reduced their work-time for their own benefit, not because their husbands would not do their
fair share of parenting and housework. It is true that by going part time these women “permit” their
husbands to continue to focus on full-time careers and to minimize family commitments, but rather
than feeling victims, many of these women pitied their husbands for missing out on the joys of
parenting.
An important part of what makes this strategy successful is the fact the women involved
have reconstructed the traditional package of “housewife” almost as much as they have reshaped
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the package of being a “professional”. At work they have minimized what they see as the least
satisfying aspects of their job but kept the core of satisfying work; at home they try to minimize the
domestic labor they find onerous and maximize the time they spend with children, the most
satisfactory part of the domestic package to them. To put it another way, they want to be “moms”
not “housewives.” To do this they argue that it is important that women following their path assert
control over their time at home and don’t get caught up in housework
Conclusion
Labeling female part-time technical professionals as “traditional,” as having withdrawn from work,
wanting jobs not careers, ignores their own perception that they consciously choose to remain at
work because it is central to their sense of self. Where “traditional” women value family over work,
part-time technical professionals value both work and family. They value their ability to enjoy the
benefits of both, and have deliberately chosen to do both. The identities these women are
constructing for themselves are often new assemblages, made up of bits and pieces of the old
cloth. It is in part built of a contemporary discourse of self-actualization—note the way both child
raising and work share a similar language of satisfaction and job-interest. Instead, they struggle to
insist that, yes, they have a career—just a different kind of one, and yes, they want to be moms--
just not all the time.
Time Compression at Work:
Implications for Managing the Work-Life Boundary
Frances J. Milliken
“Generally speaking, I feel pressed for time…. I generally hate it. I’m sure when I’m on my
deathbed that I will regret the way I lived, yet I cannot escape the culture that I’m a part of.”
(Male in his early thirties)
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The above quote obtained from a part-time MBA student captures a very important phenomenon
facing young professional and managerial employees in the United States at the start of the 21st century;
namely that several technological, economic, and socio-cultural trends have converged over the last decade
to create the perception that the pace and quantity of work in many occupations is increasing. Many
organizations, for example, are positioning their goods and services by claiming that they can produce
products/services faster than their rivals and that they are more willing than their competitors to
accommodate the demands of their clients (D’Aveni, 1994). This increased emphasis on speed and
flexibility has been accompanied in the last 10-15 years by other trends including the globalization of
competition, the de-layering and downsizing of organizations as well as the introduction of numerous new
technologies (i.e., e-mail, voice mail, fax machines) that make it possible to be on call for work 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week.
While much has been written about how the speed-up in information flows and product delivery
cycles has affected the nature of competition between firms (D’Aveni, 1994; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994),
considerably less attention has been paid by management researchers to the implications that this
increased emphasis on speed and shortened delivery cycles might have for employees. We believe that the
increased emphasis on speed coupled with increased competition in many industries has had the effect of
making many professional and managerial jobs more complex than they used to be as well as making many
workers feel more pressed for time at work. Leslie Perlow (1999) argues that many workers today are
operating in what she has referred to as a “time famine,” which she defined as “a feeling of having too much
to do and not enough time to do it” (p.1).
One consequence of “having too much to do and not enough time to do it” is the expansion of work
into non-work time. Indeed, research suggests that the average U.S. worker is working more hours (175
more hours to be precise) in the year 2000 than he/she worked in 1979 (Schor, 2003, citing data from the
International Labor Organization). We will argue that not only has there been pressure to work longer hours
but also that the introduction of new communication technologies (e.g., fax machines, voice mail, email,
pagers, cell phones) makes it possible to take work home and to work “24/7”. We use the term “work creep”
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to refer to the situation in which the work domain gradually encroaches on personal and family time. In
organizations that have little to no managerial support for work-family issues, or where individuals feel as
though there are negative career consequences for balancing work-family life (Anderson, Coffey, & Byerly,
2002), employees are particularly likely to experience “work creep.”
There is empirical evidence that the more hours an individual works, the more work-family conflict
he/she is likely to experience, especially time-based conflict (Greenhaus & Beutell,1985). Relatedly, Major,
Klein, and Erhart (2002) found that the more hours people work, the higher the level of work interference
with family, a variable which has been found to be inversely related to psychological well-being. Sparks,
Cooper, Fried, and Shirom (1997) also found that there was a significant relationship between hours worked
and the experience of stress and other health-related outcomes. Thus, the creeping of work into time
formerly reserved for family or personal life is likely to have consequences for workers’ stress levels and
well-being.
Data.
In a preliminary effort to learn how people today are thinking about time management in their lives,
we sent a survey via either e-mail or provided a web-link to a survey to a sample of 252 part-time MBA
students who had recently completed a graduate course in Organizational Behavior at a major northeastern
university. The majority of part-time MBA students at this institution work full-time in managerial and
professional type jobs in an array of organizations and industries, including many of the Fortune 500.
Our primary purpose was to learn about how people with professional and managerial jobs are
experiencing time dilemmas in their lives. Do they perceive that they are working harder than they used to?
Do they feel more pressed for time? Do they experience work creep? Do they try to manage it? If so,
how? What do they perceive to be the personal consequences of allowing work to creep into personal or
family time? What do they perceive to be the work-related consequences of trying to protect personal time?
The survey asked open-ended questions because our primary purpose was to learn about how people think
about their time rather than to get fine-tuned quantitative data for statistical analyses. Our data, thus,
consist of what our respondents wrote to us in response to the questions we asked. We then content-coded
their responses.
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We received 114 usable surveys (a response rate of about 45%) -- 52% of the respondents are
male; 47% are female. What emerges is a picture that suggests the vast majority of our career-oriented
subjects (95%) feel pressed for time and that a majority (69%) believe that they are more pressed for time
now than they were five years ago. They also reported that time pressure had some negative effects on
work quality. The following quote illustrates the point.
I sense constant pressure caused by speeding up the delivery cycle of company's product. My
team members get frustrated since they are forced to take short cuts and [to use a] not well
designed approach. Very often, it turns out {that} right after we launch the product, it is time to fix
the product since there was not enough time to address all the issues at the time of product
development even though some issues had been identified. It causes a vicious cycle.
(Female)
To get at how the increased sense of time pressure at work affects the boundary between work
and non-work time, we asked a subsample of our respondents (N=84) whether they ever felt that work crept
into their time with family and under what circumstances did this occur. Fifty-five percent indicated that work
did creep into their private or family time. In particular, they indicated that they had to take work home with
them (32%) or check their email at home (18%) or experienced long hours of work due to an impending
project deadline (18%). Women were more likely than men to report that work crept into their non-work
lives (60% versus 50%). Women were also more likely to report difficulties in meeting the expectations that
their work organizations seemed to have for work hours, especially for so-called “face time.”
One way of not allowing work to drive out home tasks is to protect time at home by deliberately
placing a non-permeable boundary around family time; thereby, blocking off time at home from being
encroached upon by work activities. Our respondents indicated that they tried to protect their non-work
time but that doing so has costs. The following quote illustrate the dilemma:
“Absolutely [I try to block time for my personal life but] I do this at the expense of my career. If I were willing
to give up, I’d have a higher position and be earning more money.”
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(Female)
Discussion.
Clearly, many professional and managerial workers are working more hours in 2003 than they
used to work (Schor, 2003) and our preliminary data suggest that many of them are feeling more time
pressure than they used to feel. In the final part of this presentation, we hope to consider the consequences
of the acceleration of the pace of work for the future of work-life integration dilemmas.
The thief to be most wary of is the one who steals your time.”
(Anonymous.)
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"Studying the Relationship Between the New Career and Life Balance:
Preliminary Results"
Douglas T. Hall, Ellen Ernst Kossek, Mary Dean Lee, Jon Briscoe, and Betzaluz Gutierrez
There has been a great deal of interest in issues of work and life balance or integration over the
last decade and a half (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985; Greenhaus & Parasuraman, 1999), as well as
inquiry into the “new deal” in careers (Hall, 2002; Arthur, Inkson, & Pringle, 1999.) However, the
two literatures represented by these concepts, the careers literature and the work/life literature,
have been generally independent of each other. This paper is an attempt to relate the two areas of
research through the development of a scale to measure an individual’s orientations toward each.
Last year at the Academy of Management meeting, two of the current authors reported on
the development of a scale designed to measure a person’s Protean Career Orientation (PCO), as
well as two related concepts, a Boundaryless Orientation and an Organizational Mobility
Orientation (Briscoe & Hall, 2003). The Protean Career Orientation (PTO) is defined as the
person’s independent, values-expressive stance toward generating and evaluating career goals,
and a self-directed approach toward career management (Briscoe & Hall, 2003). A Boundaryless
Orientation is viewed as not bounded, not tied to a single organization, not represented by an
orderly sequence, marked by less vertical coordination and stability (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996).
The Organizational Mobility Orientation is the person’s (low) concern for advancing within his or her
current employing organization. Preliminary results showed that these are separate constructs.
The PTO was unrelated to the Organizational Orientation (r= .07, ns), while the PTO and the
Boundaryless Orientation were positively correlated (r = .34, p< .01). The Boundaryless
Orientation and the Organizational Mobility Orientation were also unrelated (r = -.10, ns.) (Hall &
Briscoe, 2003).
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In the current project we extend this analysis to see how these career constructs relate to
the person’s orientation to home, community, and work/life integration. We will examine the
following work/life constructs:
Whole life balance focus: A high score indicates that the person gives high priority to his
or her own development as a whole person. This includes having a good work/life balance
and finding time for oneself, to pursue one's own interests, hobbies, and learning.
Family focus: A high score indicates a high priority to family needs when one is making
decisions about life and career. ("Family" is defined as a spouse or partner, children,
parents, or others with whom you share your life and/or home). Time for family is a driving
force in the person's career decisions, and he or she looks for a good fit between your
work life and your home life.
Community involvement: A high score here indicates a high value for service to the
community where one lives and that having flexibility to be involved in the community will
be important in making job and career choices
Thus, in this paper we will test the relationships among the three career variables and the
three work-life variables. We will also explore the relationships between all six of these variables
and certain aspects of work and life experience, in an attempt to explore the construct validity of
the scales.
The setting
The current project examines the current experiences of people who had negotiated
reduced workload (RWL) arrangements with their employing organizations five years ago. It was
follow-up to an earlier study conducted by Lee and her colleagues, who found that more and more
corporations are incorporating non-standard work arrangements to accommodate valued
employees, as well as to attract new employees who are likely to have an appetite for these new
work forms (Lee, MacDermid, and Buck, 2000). Our basic question was, “Where are they now?”
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Are they still on RWL? Back working full time? Not working? We were also interested in factors
related to their choices about their current workload arrangements, such as the role of the career of
the spouse or partner, or the role of the family.
Method
Participants were 82 managers and high level professionals who had been interviewed five
years after they had started working part time and who filled out the Career and Life Orientation
Survey. They were employed in the financial services, technology, and consumer products sectors
in Canada and the United States. The procedure was to conduct a two-hour telephone interview
with each participant, covering a wide range of career and life issues, centering on the person’s
current work arrangement (part-time, full-time, not employed, retired, etc.) Following the interview,
the person was e-mailed the survey, and the person then completed the survey and e-mailed back
the completed form.
The analysis consisted of computing descriptive statistics and Pearson product-moment
correlations among the variables. In addition to the six career and work/life scales, the following
other measures were included:
Demographic and mobility data
Family information (marital status; ages and numbers of children, for parents; elder
care, if any; etc.)
Current work status (full-time, part-time, not working/occasionally working)
Partner/spouse work status and income
Global interviewer rating of current work/life fit (vs. ideal)
Results to be discussed
We will present the internal consistency reliabilities (coefficient alphas) for the scales, as
well as the inter-correlations among the scales. The major analysis will examine questions such as
the following:
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1. Are there gender differences in the career and work/life orientations?
2. Do people who have maintained a Reduced Workload arrangement have a higher Protean
Career Orientation or higher work/life orientations than people who have returned to full
time work?
3. Are younger people more likely than older people to have a high Protean Career
Orientation?
4. Do age or family stage predict a person’s work/life orientations?
5. What is the profile of the people with the highest degrees of work/life fit?
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The Role of Human Resource Policies and Systems in the Initiation and Institutionalization
of Reduced Workload Initiatives
Alyssa Friede, Ellen Ernst Kossek, and Mary Dean Lee
Researchers have found that family-friendly HR policies are associated with reduced work-
family conflict, enhanced organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviors
(Goff, Mount, & Jamison, 1990; Lambert, 2000; Thomas & Ganster, 1995; Thompson, Beauvais, &
Lyness, 1999). Human Resources systems and managers influence the organizational climate
towards reduced-load workers, handle new issues that arise with reduced-load workers, and assist
managers of employees working a reduced-load. More research is needed on the critical role that
human resource managers play in the initiation and institutionalization of new ways of working.
Growing numbers of writers have suggested that many formal work-life policies may be
ineffective, underused by professionals and managers (cf., Hochschild, 1997), or not well linked to
the way work is designed and carried out (Bailyn, 1993), suggesting that focusing on adoption
alone and use alone may not fully tap into implementation issues. Further, professional work faces
unique challenges, where there are often norms to work sixty or more hours, a week (Lee,
MacDermid & Buck, 2000), and existing policies may not be sufficient to address work-life issues.
Consequently, cutting back hours may still result in at least forty hour work weeks, which would
qualify as “full time” under the Fair Labor Standards Act, but nor necessarily in regards to demands
emanating from professional norms.
In spite of this, many professionals have begun to challenge organizational pressures to
increase workloads and hours, by choosing to work fewer hours with a commensurate decrease in
salary in order to obtain a more preferable time allocation between work and non-work roles.
However, individuals do not make these choices in isolation. Many Human Resource Departments
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have responded to increasing demands on the part of employees for alternative work
arrangements by developing policies and informal practices related to salary, benefits, work
schedule and location, etc. in order to accommodate the changing needs of their workforce
Although the nature and implementation of these policies impacts the success of individuals
working a reduced-load, very little research has been conducted on linkages between the human
resource managers and individual and organizational outcomes. Further, research to date has
offered little in the way of practical suggestions for Human Resource managers with regards to the
management neither of reduced-load policies and practices, nor on future research to address
these gaps. This presentation will address this gap in the literature by discussing findings from over
50 interviews with Human Resource managers in major corporations throughout the United States
and Canada. We provide insights into the real challenges that Human Resource managers face on
a daily basis with regards to reduced-load work arrangements and the important lessons they have
learned along the way. We will discuss the organizational philosophy towards reduced-load work
arrangements, the initiation, evolution, and implementation of these arrangements within
organizations, the key challenges faced by these companies, and the important lessons learned by
the Human Resource managers in dealing with reduced-load arrangements.
First, we will discuss the philosophy that the organizations have towards reduced-load,
from the perspective of the Human Resource manager. Simply put, we will share why these
different companies allow employees to work less than full-time. The variety of reasons offered,
ranging from recruitment and retention strategies to ethical arguments for the “right thing to do,”
shed light onto important issues related to organizational support for alternative work
arrangements. The organizational philosophy towards reduced-load may have an important impact
on the types of policies offered, how those policies are implemented in actuality, and the outcomes
for employees and the organizational overall.
Next, we will discuss how reduced-load work arrangements were initiated within these
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organizations. For example, some companies began their programs as a response to a mandate
by the CEO while others responded to the bottom-up demands made by employees desiring more
flexibility in the number of hours that they worked. The variety of ways in which organizations have
initiated reduced-load arrangements in their organizations is important to understand because of its
relationship to the nature of the policies offered and how they are implemented.
Yet, there is a realization that simply because a company offers reduced-load work
arrangements in their formal policies, there still may be vast differences in who has access to these
policies and how the arrangements are managed across organizations. We will discuss the
Human Resource perspective on the process of decision-making regarding reduced-load work
arrangements and the role of Human Resource professionals and the managers of employees who
desire a reduced-load in that process. Further, we will discuss the important implications for
individuals who choose to work a reduced-load, such as opportunities for promotions and the
stigma that is associated with working less than full-time in some organizations.
We will also share four key challenges associated with reduced-load work arrangements
that emerged from our interviews with these Human Resource managers, such as those
associated with gender biases against men who seek reduced-load and issues related to the
importance of how headcount is calculated within organizations. We will conclude with Lessons
Learned by these organizations as they have struggled with the implementation and management
of reduced-load within their firms, such as how to think about jobs creatively or understand the
needs of a changing workforce.
This presentation will provide valuable information to the audience regarding the nature of
reduced-load in organizations. Understanding organizational philosophies towards reduced-load,
how the programs were initiated, and how they are implemented in practice is valuable because
they allow us an in-depth understanding of the nature of reduced-load in organizations today.
Further, the presentation creates “actionable knowledge” by sharing the challenges and lessons
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learned by these Human Resource managers that can be used to inform the work-life decisions
that organizations are making today and in the future.
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The Role of Managers in Supporting Reduced-Load Work Arrangements
Pamela Lirio Dohring, Mary Dean Lee, Margaret L. Williams,
Leslie K. Haugen, and Ellen Ernst Kossek
In recent years there has been considerable attention given to examining new ways of working in
response to increased pressures from competing work and family demands (Bailyn, 1993; Epstein, Seron,
Oglensky & Saute, 1999; Meiksins & Whalley, 2003). We see that the availability and use of alternative
work arrangements in an organization can lead to increased employee job satisfaction and organizational
commitment, as well as less interference between work and family and increased well-being (Bond et al.,
2002). A body of work is developing that begins to explain why new work forms such as reduced-load work
arrangements are emerging, how they are working out, and under what circumstances they result in positive
outcomes for the individuals, work units, and organizations concerned (e.g. Barnett & Gareis, 2000; Corwin,
Lawrence, & Frost, 2001; Lee, MacDermid & Buck, 2000).
We now have a clearer picture as to how individual professional and managerial employees perceive
reduced-load work arrangements and integrate them into their lives (Lee, MacDermid & Buck, 2002;
MacDermid, Lee, Buck, & Williams, 2001). However, little research exists illuminating the role that
managers play in the creation, implementation, and maintenance of these work arrangements. We know
that managers play a variety of roles in organizations (Kotter, 1982; Mintzberg, 1973), and that there is a
diffference in behavior patterns of "successful" versus "effective managers" (Luthans, 1988). "Effective"
managers (as judged by bottom line results and subordinate ratings) compared with "successful" managers
(who advance quickly up the management hierarchy) spend significantly less time in networking activities
and significantly more time in human resource activities, such as coaching, motivating, and evaluating
subordinates (Luthans, 1988). We also know that there are fewer managers, with the changing nature of
work and the elimination of layers of management in many organizations (Lee, Hourquet, & MacDermid,
2002), and that managers do not necessarily need to be present and watching over subordinates in order to
be effective (O'Sullivan, MacDermid, Lee & Williams, 2002). We are also beginning to see more research
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on the role of managers in organizational adaptation to change. For example, Huy (2002) in a study of
radical change in a large organization recently discovered that when middle-level managers attend to the
emotions of employees affected by change and organizational adaptation, there is greater acceptance of the
change.
It is predicted that more and more professionals will choose alternative work arrangements for at
least one period of time in their careers, due to the sharp increase in the number of dual career families in
the work force and the fact that the number of hours in a day is not expandable (MacDermid et al., 2001).
As organizations cannot afford to lose or under-utilize this growing portion of their workforce, we need to
learn more about what role managers play in these arrangements. A number of studies support the notion
that managers are a crucial component to the success of alternative work arrangements (Kossek, Barber &
Winters, 1999; Kofodimos, 1995; Milliken, Martins & Morgan, 1998). The research described here looks
more specifically at exactly what managers do that helps employees establish and maintain successful
reduced-load work arrangements. Three particular research questions guided our inquiry:
1. What does it mean to be a “supportive manager” in the context of a work unit with professionals
working on a reduced-load basis?
2. What do managers do to facilitate implementation and maintenance of reduced-load arrangements
among professional direct reports?
3. How do managers approach the challenges of managing, evaluating and developing professionals
on reduced-load?
This paper presents findings on the role of managers in reduced-load work from a large study
conducted in 1996-98, which examined the experiences of 82 corporate professionals and managers (e.g.,
engineers, accountants, bank branch managers, sales managers) working on a reduced-load basis in 42
companies in the U.S. and Canada (see Lee, MacDermid, Williams, Buck & Leiba-O'Sullivan, 2002 and Lee
& MacDermid et al., 1998 for additional description). A 360° interview method was employed, consisting of
interviews with the target employee, his or her manager, spouse and a co-worker. Each interview was
audio-taped and transcribed verbatim. The interviews focused on learning about how reduced-load
arrangements were negotiated and under what kind of terms, as well as how they were working out from a
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personal, family and organizational perspective. A grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was
used in data analysis, with a focus on material specifically related to what managers do to facilitate reduced-
load work arrangements.
First, using a subset of 30 of the cases, the first two authors pulled out themes related to the
manager's role in the reduced-load work arrangement, from both the target employee and manager
interview transcripts. Memos were created for each case in the study based on these themes. We also
included in each memo an assessment of the overall significance of the manager’s role in the success of the
reduced-load work arrangement. Moreover, other contributing factors such as the target employee’s self-
management behaviors and strategies, the organizational culture, and the organizational policies and
practices were noted. From the 30 memos, we were then able to identify recurrent themes and create a
typology of observed managerial behaviors and attitudes. We then examined the remaining 52 memos to
test the viability of the typology and to refine our categories as shown below.
Behaviors
Crafts, creates, finds reduced-load arrangement
Manager takes initiative, is entrepreneurial in offering an opportunity.
Manages at a distance, trusts employee
Manager exhibits “hands off” management approach, evaluates employee on results, respects
employee’s professionalism.
Develops employee
Manager maintains concern about employee’s career development, seeks out special assignments, job
enlargement, promotion opportunities.
Defends, advocates, protects employee
Manager runs interference for or shields employee from demands of others in the organization, the
“system” or the employee him or herself.
Specific logistical strategies
Manager negotiates and fine-tunes scheduling issues like team meetings to accommodate the
employee, while maintaining work unit stability and integrity.
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Attitudes
1 Open to experimentation
Manager is “open-minded” to alternative ways of working and the need to adapt to a changing
workforce.
2 Values work-life balance and diversity
Manager respects different work-life priorities of employees and is concerned about employee well-
being and work-life balance.
3 Identifies, empathizes with employee
Manager has had personal experience with alternative work arrangements or has observed a spouse,
children or close friends struggle with work-life priorities.
4 Believes in pay-off for company, “give & take” relationship
Manager is convinced that if the company is flexible and responsive to employee needs, employees will
return the favor with commitment and motivation.
5 Believes in viability of reduced-load arrangements under certain conditions
Manager develops a set of ideas about when reduced-load work is sustainable—i.e. different kinds of
tasks, circumstances, etc.
Quantitative findings of our research indicate that manager support was definitely a key variable in the
success of the reduced-load work arrangement studied. In 95% of the 82 cases, manager support was
mentioned by the employees working reduced-load as a facilitating factor, and in 70% of the cases the
managers were rated by the interviewers as highly supportive (3 on a scale of 1-3 with 3 representing the
highest level of support). In comparing the relative salience of manager support with the salience of: a) self-
management strategies on the part of the employees working less, b) organizational culture, and c)
organizational policies and practices, we concluded that manager support was clearly a highly salient factor
in 85% of the cases.
These observations provide an initial glimpse into the dynamics of the manager’s role in supporting
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reduced-load work arrangements. We see a picture emerging that shows that the manager plays a
significant role in the creation and maintenance, as well as the success of reduced-load work arrangements.
This research aims to increase our understanding of the role of managers in reduced-load work
arrangements, which may add to our understanding of managing new forms of work in general. Both
managers and organizations could benefit from these insights. In addition, individual employees could also
benefit from these results, because they could learn what to look for in a manager when they wish to
propose alternative work arrangements, or when they want to possibly guide their manager to behave in
helpful ways.
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