Leaders experiencing flexible work systems for themselves

When thinking about the role of leaders in flexible work systems, researchers, policy makers, and the general public are more likely to focus on the role leaders play in facilitating others’ access to such systems — as we have done so far in this chapter. But doing so exclusively ignores the fact that leaders themselves can also benefit from flexible work. One reason that leaders may be overlooked in this regard is that leadership roles are already invested with greater decision latitude (Christie & Barling, 2009) and the ability to schedule their own work hours, especially as they ascend the organizational hierarchy (Yuki, 2012). However, autonomy and flexible work systems are not synonymous, making it equally important to focus on leaders’ use of flexible work systems. Although research on this topic is limited, there are some studies demonstrating the benefits and challenges leaders may face when taking advantage of flexible work for themselves.

Benefits

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mental health, work-family balance, attitudinal, and performance benefits of flexible work that exist for followers also exist for leaders. Although these benefits should be sufficient to suggest that leaders, just like others holding other work roles, deserve equal access to flexible work, there are additional reasons why flexible work schedules may be uniquely beneficial for leaders, including improvements in the quality of their leadership behaviors, greater diversity in leadership roles, and organizational benefits of role modeling.

Leadership behaviors

One benefit of allowing leaders access to flexible work schedules may be to the quality of leadership behaviors. Leadership behaviors can take several positive and negative forms. The most widely studied theory of positive leadership is transformational leadership (Barling, 2014), which involves four behaviors, namely idealized influence (behaving ethically), inspirational motivation (being charismatic and inspiring), individualized consideration (being concerned with the individual needs of followers), and intellectual stimulation (developing followers to think critically for themselves). Such leadership behaviors are ideal in a workplace as they improve employee attitudes (Dumdum, Lowe, & Avolio, 2013), and performance outcomes (Wang, Oh, Courtright, & Colbert, 2011). But leadership behaviors can also take negative form. That is, leaders can engage in abusive supervision which involves “the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors” (Tepper, 2000, p. 178), or passive leadership behaviors, which involves inactive or nonresponsive leadership behaviors that deny followers the recognition they deserve for good performance (reward omission) and the punishment they warrant for poor performance (punishment omission) (Hinkin & Schriesheim, 2008). Such negative leadership behaviors have negative consequences for employee attitudes (Mackey, Frieder, Brees, & Martinko, 2017) and organizational outcomes (e.g., workplace injuries, Kelloway, Mullen, & Francis, 2006). As such, researchers have recently concentrated efforts into understanding what factors may predict positive — and prevent negative — leadership behaviors (Barling, 2014).

Although at this time there is no known research directly testing whether leaders’ adoption of flexible work arrangements cause changes to their leadership behaviors, some research suggests when leaders strike a better worklife balance — a primary benefit of flexible work systems — they do engage in more positive and fewer negative leadership behaviors. For example, a recent study by Dionisi and Barling (2019) using leader and follower dyads showed that when leaders experienced greater family-work conflict, they were more likely to experience depressive symptoms, which in turn predicted abusive supervision, as well as increased cognitive distraction at work, which resulted in passive leadership behaviors.

A different study testing leader and follower dyads (ten Brummelhuis, Haar, & Roche, 2014) investigated the effects of leaders’ family-work conflict and family-work enrichment on their experience of burnout, work engagement, and supportive leadership behaviors. Ten Brummelhuis et al. found that leaders with greater family-work enrichment come to work more engaged, enthusiastic, vigorous, and dedicated to their work. In turn, this results in more energy invested in supporting followers. Importantly, these authors also found that leaders who experienced higher levels of family-work conflict also reported feeling more burnt out at work, resulting in less supportive leadership behaviors.

The effects of burnout and depletion are not limited to reductions in supportive leadership behaviors. Across one longitudinal and one daily diary study, Courtright et al. (2015) showed that greater family-to-work conflict was indirectly associated with abusive supervision, with this effect being as mediated by daily ego depletion.

Although the causal effects of a flexible work system on leadership behaviors remains to be directly tested, we suggest that some of the lessons drawn from the above studies predict a similar pattern of findings. Drawing on principles from the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoil, 2002), we believe that when leaders enjoy greater flexibility in setting their work schedules, the increase in family time would serve to regenerate psychological resources and energy (ten Brummelhuis et al., 2014). In turn, these extra psychological resources could help leaders refrain from enacting bad leadership behaviors, and provide the necessary energy to engage in good leadership behaviors (Lin, Scott, & Matta, 2019).

Leader diversity

Perhaps one of the most socially important benefits of leaders’ using flexible work schedule themselves would be the increased likelihood of diversifying the potential pool of organizational leaders. Specifically, female leaders, who still shoulder more home responsibilities than their male counterparts, may benefit especially from flexible work hours, enabling them to ascend the organizational hierarchy and break the glass ceiling more easily.

There is strong evidence indicating that flexible work hours help females as they move up the organizational and leadership hierarchy. Compared to males, females place greater value on flexible working hours to meet the needs of their demanding schedules beyond work (e.g., Lombard, 2001). Females whose organization offers greater flexible work hours report higher organizational commitment and job satisfaction than females who have less access to such flexibility (Scandura & Lankau, 1997), as a result of which females may stay longer in organizations that provide flexibility. In addition, the availability of flexible work policies also affects females’ leadership aspirations more greatly than it does for males (Fritz & van Knippenberg, 2017), such that females feel more motivated to seek leadership roles in their organization if flexible work schedules are available. Importantly, the development of more work-life policies over time has been associated with the rise of females holding lower-level and senior-level managerial roles (Dreher, 2003), but the benefits to female leadership emergence can take several years to appear (Kalysh, Kulik, & Perera, 2016).

The existence of flexible work schedules and policies may also support female leaders ascending into higher executive leadership roles. In a crossnational examination of 9,627 managers in 33 countries, Lyness and Judi-esch (2008) showed that managers who can establish a work-life balance are ultimately rated as higher in career-advancement potential. This was specifically the case for females in egalitarian cultures. Although some research contradicts these findings (e.g., females who take advantage of flexible work schedules are perceived as less motivated towards career advancement; Rogier & Padgett, 2004), Lyness and Judiesch’s (2008) findings suggest that females who can achieve a work-life balance send signals to others that they are capable of handling greater leadership responsibilities. By implementing strategic workplace flexibility policies, organizations can retain talented females, and increase their likelihood of advancing into leadership positions over time.

Flexible work schedules may also promote religious diversity in organizations. Many employees have religious beliefs and obligations that require regular and frequent prayer during working hours. This is a significant issue, as research has documented that prayer practices at work can result in discriminatory behaviors by others (Ghumman, Ryan, Barclay, & Markel, 2013). Although speculative, we suggest that meeting religious obligations at work may indirectly reduce the likelihood of being selected for leadership roles if short-term absence from one’s work tasks or station are perceived as a lack of commitment, or a dual commitment that places work secondary. However, flexible work schedules would seamlessly integrate religious obligations with work, such that employees meeting those obligations would be at no disadvantage in ascending the organizational hierarchy.

Role modeling

Another meaningful benefit of leaders using flexible work schedules for themselves is the role modeling effect it will inspire. Individuals romanticize the role of leaders in organizations (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985), and look to their behaviors as indicators of what is considered acceptable, normative, and encouraged, especially with regards to ethical behavior (Trevino & Brown, 2005). If leaders themselves take the opportunity to work flexible hours, and these same policies are available to followers, the leaders’ behaviors will legitimize and reinforce their use for others because of the important role leaders’ values and behaviors fulfil in setting and maintaining company culture (Schein, 1992), especially when these values and behaviors are rewarded and/or punished. Thus, when leaders take the opportunity to use flexible working hours, they normalize the use of such policies (Allen, 2001).

The challenges

Finally, there are some challenges unique to leaders when taking advantage of flexible work systems, including managing boundaries between work and non-work, understanding the advantages afforded to one’s self in a leadership role, and re-conceptualizing one’s role as a leader.

Managing boundaries

Perhaps counterintuitively, managing the boundaries between work hours and personal hours can be more challenging within flexible work systems (Desrochers, Hilton, & Larwood, 2005). This is because greater flexibility can engender greater role ambiguity. Although leaders are more likely to use flexible work policies than non-leaders (Lambert, Marler, & Gueutal, 2008), the benefits of these policies for leaders themselves has been mixed. For example, in a qualitative study conducted on Australian managers, increased flexibility resulted in the perception that managers have less control over time demands, and the feeling that they could not as easily access flexible work hours as compared to other work roles (e.g., subordinates) in their organization (Parris, Vickers, & Wilkes, 2008). Similarly, the availability of flexible work hours increased managers’ feelings of anxiety and external pressures (Ford & Collinson, 2011), as such policies (a) threatened their self-perceived organizational status, and (b) left leaders feeling as though they had higher expectations of achieving a perfect work-family balance by both employees and their family members alike. Thus, organizational leaders need to pay special attention when creating boundaries between work and personal/family time.

Understanding role differences

There are two important challenges leaders may face as a function of their work role. First, the opportunities available to them may not extend to the employees they supervise. This might immediately raise concerns around perceived fairness in the workplace for their subordinates. Second, the flexible work hours worked by a leader may encourage followers to work similar hours, which may not be ideal. For example, if a leader chooses to work late at night, followers may implicitly get the impression that this is expected from them. Being unable to participate, or having unreasonable expectations, can ultimately jeopardize any benefits that might accrue from the leader serving as an ethical role model, once again emphasizing the importance of customizing flexible work for each employee.

Changing how leaders think about their role

At one level, leaders need to reconceptualize how their own work is evaluated in order to successfully implement and maintain flexible work systems and policies — from hours present on the job to the actual productive output of workers. At a more personal level, this means that leaders need to change how they go about fulfilling their leadership role on a day-to-day basis — the same reconceptualization of self-evaluation needs to occur. Specifically, their role might be less about continual performance monitoring, and more about creating and fostering those work conditions that bring out the best in their followers, and that help new leaders develop. This initially involves the difficult personal challenge of relinquishing control and replacing it with trust in and opportunities for autonomy for team members.