Conditional Effects of Workplace Flexibility on Health Across Communication Classes - A LCA Analysis

Abstract

In the 21st century, flexible work is one of the megatrends shaping how modern work takes place. Particularly prior research on the relationship between workplace flexibility and health has shown inconsistent findings. Following the assumption that not every workplace setting is suited for spatially dispersed working behavior, it is expected that this inconsistency may be due to unobserved heterogeneity in the workplace setting of employees. Specifically, the means of communication, as well as task interdependence characteristics, might explain some of this heterogeneity. Using latent class analyses, five communication classes, are identified based on participants responses regarding their use of several communication channels for information exchange with colleagues. Based on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, it is theorized that there are different relations between workplace flexibility behavior and health, i.e. emotional exhaustion, for employees in different communication classes. Hence, the role of varying task interdependency levels is examined within those classes. Hence, we hypothesize that workplace flexibility can unfold positive effects on employees’ health especially for employees that are used to communicate virtually. Moreover, we follow that high task interdependency implies high communication requirements, and thus, workplace flexibility can only be beneficial when strong virtual communication is practiced. We follow an exploratory person-centered approach by applying latent class analyses with a secondary model (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2014) to explore the sample of 7’178 German employees. Results support the hypotheses and indicate that workplace flexibility is particularly beneficial for employees with high virtual communication and high task interdependencies. The factors are considered as crucial boundary conditions for examining relations of workplace flexibility.