Workplace Flexibility

Abstract

As communication technologies develop and as organizations create policies to deal with global expansion and work−life balance, work practices and organizational lives have shifted, giving rise to a model of work where employment is not restricted to one particular place or to standard work hours. This model, workplace flexibility, has been the topic of many fields including sociology, organizational psychology, industry relations, gender studies, management, and health research. This article brings together influential studies from these fields and identifies key themes and topics of interest: the institutional and organizational forces that drive demand for workplace flexibility, types and practices of flexibility, disparities in the provision, access to, and usage of flexibility, the impact of flexibility on work-, family-, and health-related outcomes, and variation in these outcomes by workers’ characteristics and across contexts. Only articles published in English are included, but great efforts have been made to include as many international and cross-national studies as possible. As will be seen, research findings on workplace flexibility are not always consistent. Indeed, despite a growing literature that praises work flexibility for accommodating employees’ needs to balance work, leisure, and family and for reducing gender inequalities, there are also studies criticizing flexibility for fueling heightened job demands and job insecurity and for enlarging gender inequalities. This contradiction can be partially addressed by realizing that researchers do not always define “workplace flexibility” in the same way (see more discussion in Types of Workplace Flexibility). Unless noted otherwise, this article defines workplace flexibility as the ability of workers to make choices regarding when, where, and for how long they engage in work-related tasks. Flexible work arrangements, therefore, are organizational practices that permit employees to adjust their work schedule or location to better manage demands outside of work. Rigorous studies—through group-randomized trials or natural experiments—show that flexibility can promote employer and employee outcomes, but only through a systematic cultural change in how work is defined and how workers are rewarded. Given the still prevalent ideal worker norms that expect workers to be highly dedicated to work and that use “time at work” as the sole metric to assess productivity, a more profound change is needed to remove the stigma around flexibility so as to provide viable solutions to contemporary employees’ needs.