Social contagion in employees’ assessment of work-life practices: a framework of social contagion processes, assessment dimensions, and national context

ABSTRACT

Although employees increasingly need support to reconcile work and family, many lack a thorough knowledge of work-life practices such as flexible work arrangements, leaves, and dependent care programs, or they hesitate to use them. Building on social network and social contagion research, this paper argues that employees assess work-life practices not in isolation but through relational processes of social priming, social influence, and social comparison. I delineate six dimensions along which employees assess work-life practices–visibility, relevance, employer's motivations, instrumentality, fairness, and relative generosity–and analyze social contagion processes in networks of strong and weak ties, expressive and instrumental ties, within and outside the organization. I then examine how the national context may intervene in these processes by making the information that flows across ties more or less gender normative and by setting employees’ expectations for employer work-life support.

KEYWORDS:

• Social contagion
• Social networks
• Human resources management
• Work–family
• Work-life
• National context

Acknowledgments

I am most thankful to Berrin Erdogan and Jeffrey Greenhaus for their insightful comments on prior versions of this manuscript and to Alyssa Friede Westring for encouraging the development of this paper for a symposium of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. I thank Sabrina Pellerin for her rigorous research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Ph.D., is a Management Professor and the Director of the International Network on Technology, Work and Family at the University of Quebec in Montreal (ESG-UQAM), Canada. Her research examines work and life across different national contexts, with a focus on the regulation of digital technologies. She has published Living with Digital Surveillance in China. Citizens’ Narratives on Technology, Privacy, and Governance (Routledge, 2023) and over 70 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in management, sociology, and information systems journals (e.g., Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Human Relations, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Computers in Human Behavior).