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The paper aims to explore the relationship between office occupier work activity and workplace provision. It tests the proposition that location-fixed office workers are not well-supported in the working environment as location-flexible office workers. The research also explores the perceptions of the workplace provision based upon the types of tasks completed at the desk-location, whether this was collaborative or focussed.

The research adopts a cross-sectional approach using an online questionnaire to collect data from several offices in the Middles East. The dataset consists of 405 responses. One-way analysis of variance was conducted to understand the relationship between location flexibility and perception of productivity. In addition, a series of t test were used to evaluate the relationship between work activities and office environment.

The results show that those workers who were location-fixed perceived the workplace provision to have a more negative impact on their productivity than those who had a greater level of location-flexibility, particularly with regards to noise levels and interruptions. In terms of types of activities, those that undertook more collaborative tasks valued the facilitation of creativity and interaction from the workplace provision.

The research has limitations as data collection was at one-point in time and therefore lacks the opportunity to undertake longitudinal analysis. However, the research gives greater insights into the alignment of office environments based on flexibility and work activity.

The paper identifies implications for the design and development of office environments by identifying the need for office occupier activity profiles. These profiles can underpin data-led design which should promote a tailored choice appropriate work setting that can maximise productivity.

This paper contributes to the research area of workplace alignment. It establishes that optimal workplace alignment requires a better understanding of office occupier needs based on location-flexibility and work activity.

This paper proposes locational ambidexterity as a location-specific factor based on an operation flexibility perspective, and explores why and how multinational corporations (MNCs) proactively deal with uncertainty by valuing locational ambidexterity in making location decisions.

Location choice data for foreign direct investment (FDI) at a sub-national level in China is used to test the role of locational ambidexterity.

We find that FDI generally prefers locations with high ambidexterity. Moreover, investments from a heterogeneous country context are more sensitive to locational ambidexterity than those from a similar country context. However, there is no significant evidence that wholly owned investments favor locational ambidexterity more than do international joint ventures.

An alternative operationalization of locational ambidexterity may be needed. Future research could explore the sources of locational ambidexterity, identify other firm- and industry-level factors that could alter the value of ambidexterity, investigate how MNCs integrate locational ambidexterity into organization-specific option creation strategies and test the ambidexterity perspective with micro-level location choice data.

Locational ambidexterity may reduce the overall risk and adjustment cost of future changes. FDI may choose a location with high ambidexterity, i.e. a balanced portfolio of location-specific determinants, under uncertainty about the future.

Drawing on the notion of location flexibility from Buckley and Casson (1998), this study identifies a new location character, locational ambidexterity, and proposes that MNCs address uncertainty by choosing ambidextrous locations that offer more flexibility for MNCs to change or respond to potential volatility. Selecting locations with high ambidexterity is thus an alternative and complement to the organization-specific flexibility creation strategies suggested by the literature on real option and flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to create a resilient supply chain (SC) plan to contain disruptions and risks in the overall operations of a business.

The study integrates resilience considerations in a business planning model that formulates resilience performance (RP) of SC functions in terms of flexibility, reliability, and similar system factors. It evaluates the RP of SC plans and determines their vulnerability considering required and planned resources. The model estimates the possible effects of disasters on vulnerable functions using a scenario-based analysis and plans containment options. It also includes decision options for deploying resources to achieve the expected levels of resilience by preventing potential vulnerabilities. The model takes optimum decision in a what-if approach by comparing performance of the existing business plan, with options for containing the vulnerabilities inherent in not considering potential risks when planning to fulfill market demand, and the performance of a resilient plan that includes decision options to prevent vulnerabilities where possible and mitigate them otherwise.

It is possible, for example, to evaluate RP of SC plans, identify vulnerable functions, and decide optimum option to create resilient business system.

The present study takes a generic approach and creates bases to explore its application in any industry-based case.

The research introduces formulations for RPs and vulnerability indices that can be included in a planning model to create a resilient SC.

The COVID-19 pandemic found deliberate and idiosyncratic adoption of telecommuting and other flexibility practices across industries. With the pandemic waning, many organizations adopted various models for employee work locations. Based on Self-Determination Theory and Social Comparison Theory, the authors examine the impact of the dissonance between employee preference for their work location and enforced work location norms and its impact on general well-being and organizational commitment.

The authors’ empirical study is based on a sample of 881 respondents across multiple industries in India over six months of the COVID pandemic. The authors use PLS-SEM for data analysis to examine the model and the moderating influence of individual resilience on control at work.

The authors find that increased dissonance between work locations reduces general well-being, control and work. Further, higher individual resilience reduces the impact of this dissonance on control at work.

The study informs policy and practices that choice of work location is important for employees to feel a higher sense of control, impacting their affective commitment and general well-being. While implementation of policies across an organization for varying job roles and complexities presents a challenge, practitioners may ignore this need of employees at their peril, as employees are likely to demonstrate lower well-being, engagement and organizational commitment and eventually leave.

This study is significant as it provides relevant scholarship based on the COVID-19 pandemic, guiding practice on future ways of working. This study further supports the impact of an individual's sense of control on where work is done. The authors build a strong theoretical foundation to justify the impact of the lack of autonomy in the emerging working norms on employees' general well-being and organizational commitment.

This study aims to examine how the amount and type of flexibility in work schedule (flextime) and work location (telecommuting) may be related to receiving fewer training and development opportunities. Given that under flextime, employees remain at the work location, while under telecommuting employees are removed from the regular work site and social system, the paper expects that as employees have more telecommuting flexibility, they will receive fewer training opportunities, which in turn will be associated with more negative job attitudes and behaviors.

Participants (n=298) were recruited from a healthcare and a software development firm. Employees provided self-report ratings of their intentions to quit and supervisor supportiveness. Supervisors rated employees' citizenship behaviors and the flextime, telecommuting and training and development practices for the job positions.

As employees possess greater flexibility to telecommute, they received fewer training and development opportunities, while employees with greater work schedule flexibility (flextime) actually received more training opportunities. Additionally, the paper finds that training and development mediates the negative relationship between telecommuting flexibility and organizational citizenship behaviors. Thus, as employees had greater telecommuting flexibility, they exhibited lower levels of organization citizenship behaviors.

This study provides evidence of how greater telecommuting flexibility that leads to decreased training and development opportunities may negatively influence employees' citizenship behaviors. The study also supports that flexibility to work away from the regular work location and not schedule flexibility, is the key antecedent. The findings suggest that supervisors should monitor the amount of training opportunities provided to employees with telecommuting flexibility.

This is one of the few studies to examine telecommuting flexibility: the extent to which employees can work at home and modify their schedule in order to do so. It is also one of the few studies to compare how work schedule and work location flexibility may be differentially related to training and development. The paper examines the potential trade-offs between this flexibility and receiving fewer training and development opportunities.

This study aims to understand how knowledge workers working from home during COVID-19 changed their views on physical work environments and working-from-home practices.

This study conducted a survey targeting workers in the USA recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 1,651 responses were collected and 648 responses were used for the analysis.

The perceived work-life balance improved during the pandemic compared to before, while the balance of physical boundaries between the workplace and home decreased. Workplace flexibility, environmental conditions of home offices and organizational supports are positively associated with productivity, satisfaction with working from home and work-life balance during the pandemic.

While the strict traditional view of “showing” up in the office from Monday through Friday is likely on the decline, the hybrid workplace with flexibility can be introduced as some activities are not significantly affected by the work location, either at home-based or corporate offices. The results of this study also highlight the importance of organizations to support productivity and satisfaction in the corporate office as well as home. With the industry collaboration, future research of relatively large sample sizes and study sites, investigating workers’ needs and adapted patterns of use in home-based and corporate offices, will help corporate real estate managers make decisions and provide some level of standardization of spatial efficiency and configurations of corporate offices as well as essential supports for home offices.

The pandemic-enforced working-from-home practices awaken the interdependence between corporate and home environments, how works are done and consequently, the role of the physical workplace. This study built a more in-depth understanding of how workers who were able to continue working from home during COVID-19 changed or not changed their views on physical work environments and working-from-home practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between two sub-dimensions of a leader’s empathy (perspective-taking and empathic-concern) and successful authorization of idiosyncratic deals (developmental, location flexibility and schedule flexibility i-deals).

Structural equation modeling was conducted on the cross-sectional data collected from 307 managers working in software development and support companies located in major cities in India.

While empathic-concern is positively related to successful authorization of both developmental and flexibility i-deals, perspective-taking related positively to authorization of developmental i-deals and showed no significant relationship with flexibility i-deals.

The study reiterates the importance of empathy in modern workplaces and encourages managers to be conscious of their intelligence, as well as emotions, while participating in negotiations at the workplace.

The paper relates i-deals to sub-dimensions of empathy which is a previously unexplored antecedent to i-deals.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate the relationships among the flexibility enablers and to prepare a hierarchy of these enablers to know their influences over each other in global supply chain. The framework suggests that the priority of enablers in supply chain should be determined on the basis of their driving power and dependency.

Various enablers used by researchers and practitioners for flexibility management of global supply chain have been identified. These enablers have been classified as strategic, operational and performance‐based enablers. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is used to establish mutual relationships among the flexibility enablers and to prepare a hierarchy‐based model.

It has been observed that some enablers having high‐driving power and low dependency are of strategic importance. These enablers require more attention while other enablers based on operations and performances are dependents of strategic enablers.

The index of enablers based on driving power and dependency provides an insight to supply chain managers to make the entire supply chain highly flexible and help them to respond to global uncertainties.

Presentation of enablers in the form of hierarchy using ISM and ranking them into various driving power and dependent categories is a good effort to make flexible global supply chain.

As a result of COVID-19 and associated stay-at-home orders, the number of employees working remotely reached unprecedented levels during early periods of the pandemic. Since that time, some employees have returned to the office; yet, there is a lasting impact on employees’ desires for remote work. In response, decision-makers in organizations should be equipped with knowledge regarding what makes remote work beneficial for both employees and the organization and also fair and compliant with the law. This paper aims to take a dual perspective spanning human capital and legal aspects of remote work to offer six practical recommendations to organizations.

This paper reviews the human resources (HR) scholarly literature on remote work, using principles from evidence-based management to select valid and reliable findings in which to base practical recommendations for organizations. Associated legal risks are identified through a review of the legal literature on remote work and integrated into the recommendations.

Building on a multilevel model of HR practices, the authors offer the following six practical recommendations to organizations: offer hybrid work and both location and schedule flexibility; ensure fair and compliant work schedules; acknowledge manager perceptions; ensure fair approval and evaluation of remote workers; acknowledge individual workers; and align remote work practices with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

The multilevel model of remote work practices discussed in this paper offers an organizing framework for identifying advantages and disadvantages of remote work that future research may build upon. The six recommendations help bridge the research–practice gap by providing organizations with knowledge on how to maximize the benefits of remote work while mitigating potential legal risks.

This paper aims to discuss the importance of flexible working time arrangements in the United States (U.S.). Section I creates a framework to analyse the various dimensions of working time and their impacts. It examines the availability of flexitime and its potential costs and benefits to workers and employers. Section II describes the current distribution and differential access to flexitime by workers' demographic characteristics and by industry and occupational sector. Section III analyses these data to estimate the probability that workers with a given demographic or work characteristic have access to flexitime daily schedules. The fourth and final section discusses the implications of the findings. The empirical findings reveal that many workers are gaining flexibility in the timing of their daily work schedules, but access to flexible schedules remains uneven by characteristics of workers such as gender or race and by their jobs such as skill‐level, job status and hours status. Having flexible scheduling comes at the expense of working long average hours per week, or re‐locating to part‐time or self‐employment status or “unsocial” evening shifts. One implication of this is that a public policy aimed at flexible work hours for workers benefit must seek first to spread such flexibility to those who are currently not sharing it because of their occupation, industry or other personal or labour market characteristics.