TY - JOUR
T1 - Fine-tuning what we know about employees' experience with flexible work arrangements and their job attitudes
AU - Chen, Yan
AU - Fulmer, Ingrid Smithey
N1 - Funding Information:
1 We acknowledge the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, the Economic and Social Research Council, the U.K. Commission for Employment and Skills, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research as the cosponsors of the 2011 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) data. This data set is publicly available from the U.K. Data Service (http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk). None of these organizations bear any responsibility for the author’s analysis and interpretation of the data. 2 We also reestimated the moderation model by specifying group-mean centering for the level 1 predictors and adding in the group mean of the level 1 predictors in the level 2 intercept model (Hofmann et al., 2000). The parameters across these two final models are virtually identical, ensuring that the results for cross-level interactions were not spurious. To be consistent with the investigation of all other hypotheses, we reported the grand-mean centered results above.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - Prior research has generally found positive relationships between flexible work arrangements (FWAs) and employee attitudes. However, we know relatively little about organizational contingencies that affect the strength of these relationships, as there is little multilevel, multicompany research on FWAs. This study explores three aspects of employees' experience with FWAs—perceived availability of the number of FWAs, different types of FWAs, and actual use of FWAs—and their corresponding effects on employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using a large multicompany data set (1,799 companies, 17,895 workers), we found that employees who perceive more FWAs available to them have higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, especially in organizations that report offering fewer formal FWA policies. Among different types of FWAs, perceived availability of flexible scheduling is more positively associated with job satisfaction than flexible location and hours, and both flexible scheduling and location are more positively associated with organizational commitment than flexible number of hours. We also found that employees who actually use flexible scheduling have lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment than those who have it available but do not use it. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
AB - Prior research has generally found positive relationships between flexible work arrangements (FWAs) and employee attitudes. However, we know relatively little about organizational contingencies that affect the strength of these relationships, as there is little multilevel, multicompany research on FWAs. This study explores three aspects of employees' experience with FWAs—perceived availability of the number of FWAs, different types of FWAs, and actual use of FWAs—and their corresponding effects on employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using a large multicompany data set (1,799 companies, 17,895 workers), we found that employees who perceive more FWAs available to them have higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, especially in organizations that report offering fewer formal FWA policies. Among different types of FWAs, perceived availability of flexible scheduling is more positively associated with job satisfaction than flexible location and hours, and both flexible scheduling and location are more positively associated with organizational commitment than flexible number of hours. We also found that employees who actually use flexible scheduling have lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment than those who have it available but do not use it. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
KW - attitudes
KW - compensation and benefits
KW - quality of work life
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U2 - 10.1002/hrm.21849
DO - 10.1002/hrm.21849
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85030648237
SN - 0090-4848
VL - 57
SP - 381
EP - 395
JO - Human Resource Management
JF - Human Resource Management
IS - 1
ER -