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The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of social accounting at the micro level and examines the use of social reporting for constructive purposes through internal communication devices. It explores the discourse adopted by a large organisation in social accounting and reporting (workplace flexibility) through employee newsletters. In doing so the paper seeks to answer two research questions. First, what workplace flexibility practices are evident in the employee newsletters? Second, do management use discourse (including self-accounts) in newsletters for self-serving management control purposes or for the emancipatory purposes of benefiting employees?

Content and discourse analysis are used to examine “workplace flexibility” practices portrayed within the newsletters. This study explores the discourse adopted by a large Australian financial institution, in its social accounting disclosure in employee newsletters. It does so by examining the discourse adopted by the organisation in relation to one aspect of social accounting, that is, “workplace flexibility” in the employee newsletters over the period 2003-2007.

The paper finds the financial institution used its internal newsletters to influence employee attitude and behaviour, not as claimed for social “betterment” – justice, welfare, emancipation. The possibility of social accounting's emancipatory potential was suppressed by those responsible for providing the accounts. The paper found that management used discourse (including self-accounts) in the newsletters for self-serving management control purposes and not as claimed for benefiting employees.

The idea that the organisation provides workplace flexibility for the sake of benefitting employees is questionable. The discourse found in the newsletters suggests that flexible work options instead appear to be aimed at garnering employee loyalty, with subsequent employer benefits of improved organisational performance. The organisation used the discourse on workplace flexibility to blur the boundaries of work and life and persuade the employees to work harder and longer, to continuously increase productivity. In doing so, the organisation camouflaged its own economic sustainability and profitability as workplace flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contribution of human resource (HR) commitment practices to firm performance through the adoption of workplace practices that require the organisational climate created by HR commitment practices.

The approach is a survey of 156 Spanish firms and statistical test of research hypotheses through structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that the extent that employees have access to HR commitment practices and HR social benefits is positively related to the intensity of telework adoption. Firm performance is positively associated to the intensity of telework adoption, functional flexibility and internal numerical flexibility, and negatively related to external numerical flexibility. HR commitment practices impact directly and indirectly on different measures of firm performance.

Cross‐sectional, survey‐based data that cannot infer causality. Longitudinal and qualitative designs are needed to get a better understanding of the relationships. A follow‐up study of employees perception of several variables analysed in this study (e.g. access to HR commitment practices and employee benefits) could reveal possible contradictions between what policies managers claim there exist, and what policies employees perceive to exist.

The adoption of HR commitment practices can facilitate the organisational change required by the adoption of telework.

The findings provide evidence that HR commitment practices are indirectly related to firm performance through their effects on the use of flexibility practices like telework that require organisational climates containing high levels of trust.

The purpose of the paper is to explain the impact of workplace flexibility on managers' perceptions of firm performance. The research focuses primarily on outsourcing, an increasingly common way of creating workplace flexibility, by studying its antecedents based on several economic and organisational theories.

The methodology is a postal survey to a sample of 156 Spanish firms and statistical analysis.

The findings suggest that it is important to take into account different theoretical perspectives to explain the intensity of outsourcing: all proposed antecedents of the intensity of outsourcing except differentiation strategy and cooperation are significantly associated to outsourcing. There is not any significant relationship between outsourcing and firm performance; workplace internal flexibility does impact on firm performance but external flexibility does not. However, the results change according to the category of core and peripheral outsourcing.

This study's single country setting could limit the generalizability of the findings. Longitudinal as opposed to cross‐sectional data are needed for studying the causal assumptions reported here. Future studies should also take a multiple‐source as opposed to a single‐source data collection approach. Finally, objective measures of outsourcing and firm performance, as well as moderated variables are needed to analyse differentiated impacts on firm performance.

This research makes two contributions to both practice and theory. First, the results show that the perceived impact of outsourcing on sub‐factors of firm performance is positive for peripheral activities and negative for core activities. Second, the research provides a framework to analyse the antecedents of outsourcing and the concurrent impact of outsourcing and other workplace flexibility dimensions on firm performance.

The paper explains outsourcing decisions by antecedents based on several economic and organisational theories. It also analyses the concurrent impact of outsourcing and other workplace flexibility dimensions on firm performance.

The purpose of this paper, with an organisational focus, is to offer a novel examination of the association between workforce nationality composition and workplace flexibility practices (WFPs), an under-researched topic with high potential benefits at microeconomic and macroeconomic level.

British data are used, as the UK has experienced significant immigrant flows and has a relatively high level of labour market flexibility. The Workplace Employee Relations Survey 2011, sampling 2,500 British workplaces, offers for the first time data on workforce nationality. Via zero-inflated regressions, the number of non-UK nationals employed in a workplace is assessed against a wide range of numerical, functional and cost WFPs.

There are significant links between WFPs and the employment of non-UK nationals, and these are distinct for non-UK nationals from the European Economic Area (EEA) when compared to non-UK nationals from outside the EEA. The former are more likely to be in “good” employment, with job security, working from home, job autonomy and training. Yet, both types of non-UK nationals are more likely to be employed in workplaces making high use of causal contracts. The implications of these results are discussed.

The paper addresses the need to research migration from a relatively new perspective of WFPs while also taking into account the diversity of non-UK nationals. The topic is of importance to organisations, as well as to labour market and migration policymakers. Timely results are of value in view of heightened interest in migration.

This study explores the practices of locational flexibility in the Nigerian higher education sector. It examines the realities of remotely organising and managing academics' teaching and administrative workload, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relying on the interpretative paradigm, the dataset consists of semi-structured interviews with 92 professionals in the Nigerian higher educational institution (HEI) sector drawn from private and public federal government-owned and regional (otherwise known as state government) tertiary institutions.

The study highlights the practices of locational flexibility across the Nigerian higher education sector. Therefore, it underscores the notions of locational flexibility from the perspective of Nigerian academics. It reveals a paucity in the range and usage of locational flexibility options across the Nigerian higher education sector, as well as the factors shaping its implementation and utilisation. Ultimately, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings reveal that locational flexibility is predominantly environmentally induced.

This study focused on a salient topic that explores the practices of locational flexibility, particularly in an underresearched context of developing economies, specifically Nigeria. Moreover, the study contributes to the scarce literature on locational flexibility. Additionally, unlike previous studies that are mostly preoccupied with the meaning of the concept and the importance of the practice to employees' work-life balance, organisational flexibility, and overall operational performance, this study underpins the practices, utilisation and barriers to implementing locational flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze employer responses to vacancies and skill shortages by adopting certain workplace practices.

Making use of the longitudinal nature of the Workplace and Employee Survey, a nationally representative sample of Canadian organizations, the paper applies both linear and probit models to examine incidence of positive vacancies and vacancy rates and subsequent adoptions of various workplace practices in response to such vacancies and skill shortages.

Employers respond to labour and skill shortages in a number of ways, focusing more on short‐term and less costly solutions, such as adoption of flexible working hours and increases in overtime hours, greater reliance on flexible job design and part‐time workers, and implementation of self‐directed work groups and problem‐solving teams. There is no evidence that workplaces would raise employee wages or fringe benefits to alleviate shortages.

In the absence of a well‐developed internal market, firms are likely to continue using short‐term and less costly solutions. Governments should work with firms, workers and their representatives and act strategically to resolve issues of timely identification of skill shortages in order to make informed decisions and put mechanisms in place to address such shortages.

The results are based on a national longitudinal survey and a number of important practical and policy implications are discussed in the paper

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that influence the improvement of productive work behaviour (PWB) in the dynamic, ergonomic nature.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used, in experiment 1, to select and prioritise the most relevant criteria for improvement of PWB. A multi-criteria method is used to analyse and compare the importance of four main criteria and 16 sub-criteria identified from previous studies. The structural equation modelling (SEM) is also used to validate the findings of experiment 1.

This study revealed that not all criteria are considered important for improving PWB. Flexibility and job specifications were the top-scored criteria. These criteria collectively accounted for more than 65% of the four studied criteria. The SEM emphasised the significance of flexibility and job description of the changing dynamics of organisational regulation during the contemporary economic and managerial turmoil.

This study explored the criteria required to improve PWB. The findings recommend that future studies should be designed to identify new elements and add new criteria and test the newly introduced variables at a physical workplace after the outbreak ends.

Knowledge of the differential impacts of the criteria on the performance of PWB govern decision-makers in private and governmental organisation, especially at such times of economic turmoil and need for innovative strategies.

Few studies have explored workplace behaviour and the environment in the government sector. Therefore, the focus of this study is the comprehensive coverage of workplace behaviour and the criteria influencing its productivity before and during the coronavirus outbreak.

This research focuses on the work–family facilitation process to theorize and examine the potential positive impact of perceived overqualification (POQ) on an individual’s work–family interface. Drawing on social cognitive theory of self-regulation, this research identifies work–family balance self-efficacy (WFBSE) as a motivational mechanism through which POQ affects work engagement. Additionally, it proposes flexibility human resource (HR) practices as a key moderator of this process.

This research collected multi-wave time-lagged data from 342 managers in the hospitality industry. The research focused on managers with the title of headwaiter and above, while front-line service personnel were not included.

The results showed that POQ had an indirect positive relationship with work engagement via WFBSE. The results also showed that employee-experienced flexibility HR practices moderated the effectiveness of WFBSE in translating POQ into work engagement.

This research provides guidance and insights into how HRM systems can be customized to sustain positive outcomes in situations of overqualification. It is crucial that hotels offer flexibility options or individualization of work arrangements for overqualified employees.

The potential positive impact of POQ on employees’ work–family interface has been neglected. In addition, prior research has devoted little attention to potential organizational factors that enhance the positive effects of POQ. By examining the mediating and moderating effects, this research aims to explain how and under what conditions POQ facilitates work engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) cope with the need for labour flexibility. Most previous studies ignore the labour flexibility practices of SMEs, especially in times of economic growth and tight labour markets.

A multiple case study approach is applied, with ten Dutch SMEs located in one small province with a similar labour market. A survey was executed as an intake, followed by 48 interviews with the entrepreneurs, HR and other managers and employees, and two focus groups in each company. The findings are based on an analysis of the approved case descriptions.

SMEs, like big companies, do not rely on one flexibility practice. Volume fluctuations are countered with all flexibility strategies, the mix fluctuations and the product innovations are mostly countered with flexible functions and flexible production technology. In general, the data suggest that flexibility strategies of SMEs can be characterised as ad hoc, reactive and with a short-term orientation.

Future research should include other sectors and regions enabling to generalise the findings. Future research should have a longitudinal design to include the pathway dependencies of flexibility practices.

This study identifies the need to analyse flexibility demands; reduce flexibility demands before investments in flexibility practices; create production process flexibility; invest in labour flexibility practices only after the first three steps are taken; and develop basic and more advanced levels of flexible contracts, flexible functions and flexible working times.

This study contributes to the authors’ knowledge on the use of labour flexibility practices in SMEs. In addition, it brings empirical data on how these labour flexibility practices relate to the needs for flexibility and how they relate to other sources of organisational flexibility, such as a flexible market approach and flexible production technologies. Dynamic capabilities should include the suggested operationalisation of the flexibility practices.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the underlying conflicts associated with current work‐life balance and travel‐to‐work policies, as employed in organisations in the UK.

A mixed method approach is used to ascertain whether professional work‐group cultures limit the effectiveness of work‐life balance policy, and the extent to which spill‐over is present between work‐life balance and transport preferences, especially car use. These concerns are explored empirically using an in‐depth local level quantitative‐qualitative case study of Greater Nottingham (a regional employment centre in the East Midlands region of England).

The evidence presented in this paper suggests: work‐group cultures prevent employees, especially women, from achieving work‐life balance; there is spill‐over between work and non‐work activities, creating time allocation challenges, and stress, for dual career households attempting to achieve desired work‐life balance; and specific conflicts are reported in balancing work with travel‐to‐work, especially car parking.

The research findings suggest that transport, especially employee car parking, needs to be considered a focal point in the planning and implementation of human resource (HR) policies. Employers also need to reconsider their approach to flexible working to dissolve the negative repercussions that the “choice” to work flexibly has for the careers of highly skilled workers, especially working mothers. Increases in formalised home‐based teleworking, restructuring the gender balance in management, and positive discrimination toward certain groups offer potential routes for change.

This paper provides important recommendations for employers and HR managers, designing and implementing work‐life balance policies. Transport issues, presently considered largely external from the employer perspective, have central relevance.