Reconsidering the Concept of Workplace Flexibility: Is Adaptability a Better Solution?

Abstract

Flexibility is a key issue in organizational life, especially because organizations rely on work from remote locations and create policies to accommodate work-life balance. Most existing research examines workplace flexibility in primarily the individual or the organizational domain. Views of communication in these domains typically embrace transmission or transaction assumptions without concern for how organizational discourses shape the enactment of flexibility. This paper argues that workplace flexibility emerges from the intersection among the discourses linked to four domains: organizational policies and arrangements; workplace norms and practices; worker-supervisor relationships; and an individual’s sense of agency. We contend that the discourses rooted in and across these domains introduce contradictions that come from an organizational logic that perpetuates a competition between work and life. In this logic, the burden of workplace flexibility is placed on individual workers who must make choices about whether to ignore or rebuke normative organizational practices. Rather than placing the onus on individuals, we argue that organizations need to adopt a new philosophy grounded in a discourse of adaptability, one that both workers and employers embrace. The discourse of adaptability supersedes workplace flexibility and transforms workers’ needs and the organization’s objectives into a system of worker autonomy that incorporates fluidity in achieving both personal and organizational goals.