Ironic Flexibility: When Normative Role Blurring Undermines the Benefits of Schedule Control

ABSTRACT

Schedule control is touted as a potent work-related resource that helps workers minimize work–family conflict and enhance their own well-being. We ask: Does normative role blurring undermine those benefits? Normative role blurring involves the perceived expectation in the workplace culture that workers should take work home during nonwork hours and/or days. Analyses of the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) demonstrates that normative role blurring undermines the benefits of schedule control for work–family conflict and multiple indicators of worker well-being: job satisfaction, turnover intentions, anxiety, and life satisfaction. Moreover, to varying degrees, work–family conflict contributes to those conditional effects on well-being. Our observations offer new insights about the challenges of normative role blurring in workplace cultures and their implications for the benefits of schedule control.

KEYWORDS:

• Job satisfaction
• role blurring
• schedule control
• work–family conflict
• workplace culture
• turnover intentions
• schedule flexibility

Notes

1. ROWE stands for “Results Only Work Environment” and STAR stands for “Support. Transform. Achieve. Results.”

2. Only employees who reported that they did not mainly work from home were asked the normative role-blurring question (N = 2,862). From this initial base of 2,862 cases, we excluded approximately 1.1 percent because of missing values. First, we removed the following cases that had missing values on our focal dependent variables: job satisfaction (n = 1), turnover intentions (n = 7), and life satisfaction (n = 7). We also excluded 11 cases because there is insufficient information to classify them into one of the seven different occupation codes. This reduces the final analytical sample to 2,830.

3. The weighted descriptives of these control variables are as follows: 47 percent are women; the mean age is 41 years (SD = 12.85); 59 percent are married; 75 percent are non-Hispanic white, 10 percent are African American, 10 percent are Hispanic, and 5 percent are classified as “other”; 41 percent have a high school degree/GED/or less than high school, 29 percent have some postsecondary school, 29 percent have at least a 4-year college degree; and the median personal income is $33,000. The occupational distribution is as follows: executive/managers (14 percent), professional (19 percent), technical (4 percent), sales (10 percent), administrative support (14 percent), service (12 percent), and production/operators/laborers (27 percent). Weekly work hours average 43.33 (SD = 12.30).

4. Multicollinearity checks (variance inflation factors [VIFs] for the independent variables in Stata 14) indicate a low risk of problems due to multicollinearity. Specifically, the highest VIF values are observed among the socioeconomic status variables—a pattern that might be expected because of the interrelationships among education, occupation, and income. However, these are control variables and are not problematic for the estimates of our focal variables. The three highest VIF values are 2.05 (education), 2.43 (income), and 2.82 (occupation). The overall mean VIF is 1.59.

5. In the text, we only report findings for the focal variables. Here, we articulate the most prominent patterns among the control variables across Tables 1–3: (1) workers in the following groups or with these attributes tend to experience higher levels of work–family conflict: younger age groups, more children at home, higher education, longer hours, more job pressure, less job autonomy, and less challenging work; (2) workers in the following groups or with these attributes experience higher levels of job satisfaction: women, older, white, married, less job pressure, and more job autonomy and challenging work; (3) workers in the following groups or with these attributes experience a higher likelihood of high turnover intentions: men, younger, nonwhite, not married, lower income, more job pressure, and less challenging work; (4) workers in the following groups or with these attributes experience higher levels of anxiety: women, younger, non-Hispanic white (compared to African Americans), lower income, and non-executive/managerial occupations; (5) Workers in the following groups or with these attributes report more life satisfaction: women, married, and higher income.

6. We addressed the question of whether or not our findings are due to a professional occupation bias. Separate analyses (available upon request) document that the following are associated with a greater likelihood of normative role blurring: having a college degree or higher, being in a professional occupation, and greater job pressure. By adjusting for education, occupation, and the demands associated with higher status jobs, we address concerns that observed patterns are attributable to an occupation-based bias. All estimates in the tables—including the interaction between schedule control and normative role blurring—hold steady with these adjustments. This addresses the possibility that occupation differences are driving these results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Schieman

Scott Schieman is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the social psychology of inequality and its relationship to health outcomes. He is the lead investigator of the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study (CANWSH), a national longitudinal study of workers.

Paul Glavin

Paul Glavin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University. His research examines the social antecedents and health consequences of stress in work and family life. He is a co-investigator on the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study: A National Panel Survey of Canadian Labor Force Participants funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to study work stress and its long-term consequences for workers and their families.