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| Work life balance, management practices and productivity | | Author(s) | Nick Bloom, Toby Kretschmer, John Van Reenen |
| Corporate Author | Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics - LSE |
| Publisher | London School of Economics - LSE, London, 2006 |
| Pages | 43 pp |
| Source | Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. http://cep.lse.ac.uk |
| Keywords | Employment ; Employment of older people ; Conditions of employment ; Attitude ; Employers ; Industries ; Quantitative studies ; United States of America ; France ; Germany ; United Kingdom. |
| Annotation | Do "Anglo-Saxon" management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousy work-life balance (WLB) for workers? While one side argues that increased competition from globalisation is damaging employees' quality of life, the other argues that improving WLB is actually a competitive tool that companies can use to increase productivity. The authors try to shed some empirical light on these issues using a innovative survey tool to collect new data on management and work-life balance from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. They show that their measure of WLB is a useful summary of a range of policies in the firm: family-friendly policies, flexible working, shorter hours, more holidays, etc. They show that this WLB measure is significantly associated with better management. Firms in environments that are more competitive and/or who are more productive, however, do not have significantly worse WLB for their workers. These findings are inconsistent with the view that competition, globalisation and "Anglo-Saxon" management practices are intrinsically bad for workers' WLB. On the other hand, neither are these findings supportive of the optimistic "win-win" view that WLB improves productivity in its own right. Rather, the authors find support for a "hybrid" theory that WLB is a choice for managers that is compatible with low or high productivity. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-060307203 B |
| Classmark | WJ: GC: WKA: DP: TF: X: 3DQ: 7T: 765: 767: 8 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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