Moral Foundations and Attitudes Toward Informal Paid Time-Off Accommodations

Abstract

The question of which individual and contextual differences influence employee’s attitudes toward paid time-off policy has rarely been addressed in the literature. Drawing on moral foundations theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007), this paper examined how individual differences of moral foundations and situational factors that align with the moral foundations collectively impact employees’ attitudes toward providing paid time-off accommodations. Scenario-design experiments in Study 1 and Study 2 demonstrated that factors that vary in their alignment with care, fairness, and respect for authority foundations influence employee’s attitude toward paid time-off provisions. Furthermore, individualizing moral foundations at the between-individual level strengthened the positive effect of care-triggering situations on employee attitude toward paid time-off. Study 3 investigated an archival dataset of 7,963 respondents and showed that individuals’ political self-identity, which is aligned with individualizing moral foundations, is associated with attitudes toward paid time-off.