Workplace Flexibility Practices and Corporate Performance: Evidence from the British Private Sector

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between workplace flexibility practices (WFPs) and corporate performance using data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004.Disaggregating WFPs into numerical, functional and cost aspects, enables the analysis of their relationships to an objective measure of corporate performance, namely workplace financial turnover.Furthermore separate analyses are presented for different types of workplace: differentiated by workforce size; ownership; age; wage level and unionisation. Results show that different types of workplaces need to pay attention to the mix of WFPs they adopt. We find that certain cost WFPs (profitrelated pay, merit pay and payment-by-results) have strong positive relationships with corporate performance. However, training delivers mixed corporate performance results, while the extent of job autonomy and the proportion of part-time employees in a workplace have an inverse association with corporate performance. Given the limited existing research examining disaggregated measures of WFPs and objectively measured corporate performance, this paper offers useful insights for firms, policy makers and the overall economy.

Workplace Flexibility Practices in SMEs: Relationship with Performance via Redundancies, Absenteeism, and Financial Turnover

“…There is no generally accepted theory of WFPs (Whyman et al. ). Hence, the theoretical proposition applied in this paper is to decompose flexibility into the three distinct numerical, functional, and cost flexibility areas identified by Atkinson ().…”

“…Primary data have been gathered to map WFPs onto these three flexibility areas, adopting a disaggregated model of flexibility (Whyman and Baimbridge ; Whyman et al. )…”

“…Thus, the disaggregation of WFPs addresses a gap in the literature where most studies assume that forms of flexibility are mutually exclusive and few assess a large number of WFPs simultaneously (Kalleberg ; Whyman et al. ).…”

“…However, despite this array of evidence, the impact of HPWPs on various measures of corporate performance remains uncertain: the literature has not reliably established the theoretical ways or the HPWPs through which organizational performance can be obtained (Buller and McEvoy 2012;Guest 2011;Stavrou, Brewster, and Charalambous 2010;Thompson 2011;Whyman et al 2009), or whether a mutual benefit or equitable distribution of gains may be secured (Kelly 2004;Upchurch et al 2008;Whyman and Petrescu 2013).…”

Workforce Policy and Care Quality in English Long-term Elder Care

“…The datasets offered objective measures which are recommended over subjective ones (Whyman et al, 2015). We recoded data into categorical variables other than pay (a continuous scale) to meet the criteria for linear hierarchical regression analysis (Cohen et al, 2003).…”