While a company’s work-home policy sends a signal and creates an organisational framework for decision making, an organisations culture will influence an employee’s practical experience of workplace flexibility. Does organisational culture also impact how its employees think, feel and act at home? This article explores the relationship between supportive and innovative organisational cultures, flexible work-home arrangements and employee work-home interference.
Organisational culture, though intangible in nature, has a meaningful effect on employees and organisational outcomes. “Culture” is commonly defined as referring to the taken-for-granted values, norms and underlying assumptions that characterise an organisation and its members, serving as a foundation for how the organisation works. However, company culture can extend well beyond the work domain. Employees’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that build up at work and are shaped by the work environment can be transferred to the home domain (referred to as “spillover”, or Work-Home Interference (WHI)). Culture can also implicitly determine the prioritisation of work and home obligations, e.g. the provision of work-home policies and how encouraged employees feel to make use of them can support or impede balance between these two domains.
This research, conducted by Sok (Hotelschool, The Hague), Assoc. Prof. Robert Blomme (Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen) and Tromp (Hotelschool, The Hague), examined the relationship between organisational cultures and work-home interference, both positive (where work experiences improve the quality of home life) and negative (when work and home pressures are mutually incompatible). They also examined the effect that the availability of flexible work-home arrangements has on this relationship.
The researchers found that both supportive and innovative cultures can have a positive impact on how people feel when they get home. There are some differences, however, in relation to negative impacts, namely innovative cultures create more time based pressures – and therefore time conflicts at home, whilst supportive cultures create more strain based effects, leaving people feeling overwhelmed and exhausted when they get home. Flexible work practices can help reduce the strain based impacts.
To read the full article, see Sok, J., Blomme, R. and Tromp, D. (2014) “Positive and Negative Spillover from Work to Home: The Role of Organizational Culture and Supportive Arrangements”. British Journal of Management, Vol. 25, pp.456-472.
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