In 2005 Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior, published I-Deals: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves. The book describes personal arrangements that an employee negotiates one by one, such as working from home or flexible hours, which differ from what coworkers have. The publisher says it “challenges traditional notions that standardization is the way to create workplace justice.”
Ask and Ye Shall Receive?
In 2013 Victoria Brescoll of Yale, Jennifer Glass and Alexandra Sedlovskaya asked managers to respond to employees who requested a change in their work hours. The scenarios varied the employee’s sex, job status and reason for the request.
Managers were most likely to grant flexible hours to high-status men who wanted them for career development. “All women workers, regardless of their status or the reason for their request, face a gendered wall of resistance to their requests for flextime, while men face status-specific resistance,” Brescoll said.
Flexible, Not Formal
In 2017 and 2018, 57 percent of American wage and salary workers had a flexible work schedule. Only 16 percent had a formal arrangement with their employer that permitted this flexibility. These figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the private sector, schedule flexibility without a formal arrangement was more common than in government jobs: 44 percent compared with 24 percent.
Willy asks Howard
In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, a struggling salesman, meets with his boss, Howard Wagner, to ask for a stable position in New York rather than continuing to travel. Willy tries to appeal to Howard’s sense of loyalty and decency, but Howard remains unmoved, focused solely on financial metrics.
Howard embodies a purely transactional, numbers-driven approach. He ignores Willy’s emotional appeals and repeatedly brings the conversation back to business metrics and profitability. Howard’s emphasis on facts, figures, and bottom-line results reflects the American business culture, where personal relationships and sentimentality are secondary to financial performance.