Publications

Many hotel companies, and the hotel industry in general, have been cited as having a culture of face time, that is, a culture inducing its managers to spend considerable amounts of nonproductive time at work. This subject exploratory study seeks to provide greater understanding regarding this apparently common practice but understudied academic topic. This empirical study analyzes how and to what extent the culture of the hotel industry, and of specific lodging companies, relate to levels of face time. It also analyzes how differences in hotel location and size and differences in manager age and tenure affect the extent to which hotel managers report putting in nonproductive face time at work. © 2012 International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education.

This research aims to understand the consequences of inadequate workplace flexibility through the lens of daily stress processes. Using a sample of hourly paid hotel employees with children ages 10 to 18 who participated in a daily diary study, the authors compared workers with low and high flexibility on stressor exposure, reactivity, and transmission. The findings showed a consistent pattern of hourly workers with low flexibility having greater exposure to work stressors in general and to workplace arguments in particular. Workers with low flexibility were also more emotionally and physically reactive to work stressors. There was some evidence of stressor transmission to children when parents had low flexibility. Increasing workplace flexibility could serve as a protective factor in exposure and reactivity to stressors experienced in daily life.

This chapter, with its focus on quality of work life, briefly reviews the history of work–family research (note that this term from here on is used generically to represent both workers with traditional and nontraditional families, as well as representing work–nonwork aspects of our lives more broadly), including work and leisure, demographic and workplace changes, and public policy developments in the United States. We discuss the research on work–family conflict and work–family enrichment, including antecedents, outcomes, and crossover effects extending to the family. This leads to a more recent discussion of work, family, and the community, followed by issues of work engagement and recovery stemming from work by our European colleagues. Implications of our current state of knowledge about work–life and quality of work–life issues for practicing managers and employing organizations are discussed throughout along with suggestions for future research in the field, including a call for more research on low-wage workers, health, cross-cultural issues, and efforts to push public policy in the direction of more support for workers and their families. We end the chapter with a proposed integrative systems model of the work–family interface that considers socioeconomic, legal, political, community, organizational, and family contextual factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)

This article examines perspectives on employer work—life initiatives as potential organizational change phenomena. Work—life initiatives address two main organizational challenges: structural (flexible job design, human resource policies) and cultural (supportive supervisors, climate) factors. While work—life initiatives serve a purpose in highlighting the need for organizational adaptation to changing relationships between work, family, and personal life, we argue they usually are marginalized rather than mainstreamed into organizational systems. We note mixed consequences of work—life initiatives for individuals and organizations. While they may enable employees to manage work and caregiving, they can increase work intensification and perpetuate stereotypes of ideal workers. In order to advance the field, organizations and scholars need to frame both structural and cultural work—life changes as part of the core employment systems to enhance organizational effectiveness and not just as strategies to support disadvantaged, non-ideal workers. We conclude with an overview of the articles in this special issue.