Work–life balance: promises made and promises kept

Abstract

We present evidence on the association between the management practices conventionally identified with high performance workplaces (HPWs) and measures of work–life balance. Our framework identifies those practices associated with workers reporting that their employer makes work–life balance commitments, and separately identifies those practices associated with workers reporting that their employer keeps the commitments they make. Our results do not support a role for HPWs in either the making or the keeping of work–life balance commitments. Rather, they suggest that where workers are interdependent – as in team production – the resulting inflexibility of time scheduling drives down work–life balance commitments.

Keywords:

• high performance workplaces
• motivation
• work–life balance
• work incentives

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewer for suggesting the current interpretation of our results and acknowledge the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service and the Policy Studies Institute as the originators of the Working in Britain in the Year 2000 Survey data, and the Data Archive at the University of Essex as the distributor of the data. None of these organizations bear any responsibility for the authors’ analysis and interpretation of the data.

Notes

 1. In addition to high performance workplaces, other terms used to describe the same phenomenon include high commitment management, high performance work systems and high performance work organizations.

 2. The specific measures are themselves the aggregation of several underlying indicators. Thus, the opportunity to participate variable is an index built up from indicators of the worker's ability to direct his or her own activities (autonomy), the presence of teams, and the nature of communication within the firm.

 3. Wood (1999) reworked Osterman's US data finding that an integrated package of family friendly practices is actually unrelated to HPWs, a result he and others confirmed for the UK (Wood, De Menezes and Lasoasa 2003).

 4. Although we also recognize that if HPWs create more stressful work environments, they may also need to simultaneously create family friendly practices to help workers deal with greater stress at work.

 5. We note that discouragement from management may not be the only source of reduced perceived accessibility. Kirby and Krone (2002) emphasize that co-workers can create peer pressure and complain about ‘picking up the slack’ for those on leave or taking advantage of flexible hours policies.

 6. We recognize there exists debate over the extent to which work has reduced family time (Bosch 1999; Evans, Lippoldt and Marianna 2001).

 7. We view this last allowance as critical as some workers may work long hours and be satisfied with the trade-offs involved (Drago, Black and Wooden 2005). Similarly Heywood et al. (2007) show that holding all else constant, jobs without family friendly practices often pay more. Again, workers may accept this trade-off and external observers should not presume a lack of work–life balance.

 8. Throughout our analyses, we also use the weights provided with the survey data, which take account of differing selection probabilities with respect to household size, age, sex, contractual status (full-time and part-time) and socio-economic group, using the 2000 Labor Force Survey as a benchmark (see White et al. 2003).

 9. These marginal effects are not the coefficient reported in Table 3 but the calculated influence of a chance in the indicator variable on the probability of keeping the commitment as reported by the marginal effects subcommand in STATA 9.

10. We recognize that management choices are not completely determined by technology but rather that underlying team production tends to be more supportive of team working and group reward structures (Heywood and Jirjahn 2004).

11. In addition to the specifications shown, we also removed the industry and occupational dummies from the series of estimates, and also further curtailed the controls by reducing the individual and workplace characteristics. All estimates confirmed the basic role of HPWs in increasing the probability of fulfilling the commitment and so increasing the probability of both making and keeping the commitment. These experiments are available from the authors.