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Management
Extended work availability (EWA) captures the experience of an employee who needs to be available for job demands during nonworking hours. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon because of the prevalent use of information and communication technology (ICT) such as mobile devices and internet services for work purposes. Valuable knowledge on this topic has emerged from at least two types of study. First, technology-oriented research usually stresses the role of the latest technologies adopted in the workplace. By facilitating the adoption of these technologies in the workplace, managers might help employees to decrease their working time, especially beyond normal business hours. Second, management-oriented research tends to emphasize the role of managerial strategies managers take in the workplace.
- Extended work availability
- WORK
- Employee
1. Introduction
In the past few decades, a variety of information and communication technologies (ICT) have been adopted in the workplace such that reshape the world of work to a great extent. For example, using mobile devices and internet services enables employees to perform job duties anytime and anywhere. Although ICT has the capacity of enabling employees to handle work matters more efficiently [1] and to reconcile their personal and work lives [2], employees who work outside the employer’s premises via ICT usually work longer [3]. The reason for this is usually associated with a phenomenon that has increasingly drawn scholarly attention [4,5], namely, extended work availability (EWA). EWA refers to “a condition in which employees formally have off-job time but are flexibly accessible to supervisors, coworkers, or customers and are explicitly or implicitly required to respond to work requests (p. 106)” [6]. Prior research has shown that EWA is associated with employee health problems, stress perceptions, and low recovery levels [7,8,9], which might further inhibit employees from sustainably making contributions to their organization with a high level of thriving at work (vitality and learning) [10,11]. These consequences are related to the health dimension of human capital [12], and the latter is one of the critical determinants of organizations’ sustainability [13]. Given managers often play a critical role in determining employees’ working and nonworking lives [14,15], the present study strives to answer the following research question: How can managers alleviate employee EWA in the ICT-prevalent work environment?
Valuable knowledge on this topic has emerged from at least two types of study. First, technology-oriented research usually stresses the role of the latest technologies adopted in the workplace. For example, artificial-intelligence-supported workplace decisions or algorithmic decision making in organizations usually have the capacity to increase productivity in a shorter time with less manpower. By facilitating the adoption of these technologies in the workplace, managers might help employees to decrease their working time, especially beyond normal business hours. Second, management-oriented research tends to emphasize the role of managerial strategies managers take in the workplace. For example, Matusik and Mickel found that supervisors’ expectations about responding quickly obliges employees to be accessible and responsive after normal business hours [16]. In addition, Cavazotte et al. found that the constant connectivity demands from supervisors invaded employees’ life domain and negatively affected their private sphere [17]. In a recent narrative synthesis of prior research, Schlachter et al. identified expectations, demands, and supports from one’s supervisor as the essential elements for the organizational context in predicting employee extended work hours [18]. Compared with technology-oriented research, management-oriented research lays a more promising direction towards answering our research question.
2. Temporal Leadership and Employee EWA
Temporal leadership denotes a set of time management behaviors undertaken by a leader to help employees achieve an effective use of time while performing job duties [28,29]. It captures the task-oriented behaviors of a leader that highlight temporality, such as helping employees schedule, synchronize, and allocate temporal resources at work [29,43]. These behaviors help employees to deal with a variety of time-related challenges, such as temporal ambiguity, conflicting temporal interests and requirements, and scarcity of temporal resources [44,45]. Since today’s turbulent business environment needs leaders to become much more sensitive to the temporal needs in and of their organizations, integrating time-related practices into leadership research is instructive [19,46,47].
As the widespread use of ICT is increasingly blurring the boundary of work and nonwork domains, and often extends employees’ total working hours [3], temporal leadership might play a role in responding to these issues. By helping employees schedule tasks, synchronize paces, and allocate time at work [29,43], leaders can orchestrate employees to meet deadlines in an organized way. This can mitigate employees’ suffering from time famine, which denotes “a feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it (p. 57)” [48]. Thus, temporal leadership is a “good thing (p. 121)” [49] and can serve, like other supervisor behaviors (e.g., family-supportive supervisor behavior [50]), as a job resource for employees.
Drawing on spillover theory and relevant research [21,40,53], work and family have effects on one another such that generate similarities between the two domains. Except for the similarity between a work construct and a distinct but connecting family construct (e.g., job and life satisfaction [54]), spillover can also be characterized as experiences transferred intact between work and family domains (e.g., work fatigue displayed at home [55]). Focusing on the transferred or extended experiences, the second version of spillover does not involve a linkage between a work construct and a family construct [21]. With the help of a moderately strong temporal leadership in the workplace, individuals are less vulnerable to time pressure in meeting deadlines [42]. Specifically, employees might have a weaker feeling of being stuck at work. That is, it is not necessary for them to be available for the work demands without any break during business hours.
An extremely strong temporal leadership, however, might have a TMGT effect [30]. This is because it usually captures the task-oriented rather than relationship-oriented behaviors of a leader that highlight temporality [29]. Orchestrating employees to meet time-related challenges at work often needs a leader to closely monitor their work pace or supervise their time-use behaviors. In a sense, leaders who display extremely strong temporal leadership tend to micromanage [56,57] their subordinates regarding how to meet deadlines. This is likely to undermine employees’ autonomy in deciding how to schedule, synchronize, and allocate time at work. As such, employees should always stay ready to respond to the requests of their leaders in terms of meeting a variety of deadlines and/or milestones at work. In line with the second version of spillover [21,53], such an experience of employees in the work domain might transfer or extend to the nonwork domain.
3. The Effect of Employee Procrastination
Procrastination refers to an individual tendency to “voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay (p. 66)” [31]. It is usually considered as a pernicious form of self-regulation failure [31,58]. Given its temporal property in delaying a planned course of action, procrastination often has a close association with the lack of time management skills [59,60]. Thus, individuals who are high in procrastination tend to have difficulty in completing their assigned tasks within the formal working time.
For those who can deal with work during off-time beyond normal workplaces, procrastination usually puts them under pressure to handle work matters even when they are off duty. In fact, procrastinators are likely to lose work–life balance under such flexible job conditions [61]. A recent study found that there is a positive association between procrastination and a prolonged working day [62]. Moreover, procrastination has also been found to have a negative association with employees’ psychological detachment from work [63]. Therefore, employees with high procrastination are more likely to experience a heavy requirement to remain available for job demands on workdays. Additionally, in line with the second version of spillover [21,53], a similar experience might emerge in the nonwork domain. Consequently, employees who are high in procrastination probably suffer from the experience of EWA during off-time.
Drawing on spillover theory, time allocation decisions may moderate the relationship between work time and family time [21]. As procrastination usually entails making decisions on how to allocate one’s time into his/her planned and other actions [64,65], it might play a similar role when exploring the relationship between temporal leadership and employee EWA. Specifically, both the negative and positive associations would be enhanced for employees with high procrastination. That is because procrastination is a form of self-regulation failure [31,58]; employees with high procrastination usually have difficulties in managing their time effectively.
For employees with high procrastination, a moderately strong temporal leadership enables them to make better use of time. With leaders helping them schedule, synchronize, and allocate temporal resources [29,43], employees with high procrastination can more easily achieve an effective use of time while performing job duties. Not to mention moderately strong temporal leadership might elicit employees’ positive affect (e.g., vigor [33]), which helps procrastinating employees overcome procrastination [32]. As such, they are less likely to be pressed to meet deadlines [42] again and again within regular hours. In a sense, they might be somewhat relieved from the nonstop availability of the job demands, especially when deadlines are approaching. Following the experience spillover process [21,53], employees with high procrastination will be able to alleviate their suffering of EWA with the help of a moderately strong temporal leadership.
When coupled with an extremely strong temporal leadership, however, high procrastination could exacerbate the pernicious effect of temporal leadership on employee EWA. On the one hand, managers who display extremely strong temporal leadership deprive the time-related autonomy of employees regarding how to meet deadlines through micromanagement [56,57]. This might hamper employees’ positive affect (e.g., job satisfaction [34]) because of the deprivation of autonomy in deciding how to use time themselves. In this vein, an extremely strong temporal leadership would inhibit employees from initiating tasks earlier, such that they need to handle unfinished work matters during off-time (i.e., EWA). On the other hand, employees with high procrastination usually voluntarily delay the planned course of action [31] until they truly decide to accomplish it. Thus, conflicts regarding how to use time are likely to occur when procrastinating employees work under an extremely strong temporal leadership. This kind of inconsistency has been argued to hinder leader–follower coordination [66]. In addition, procrastination has been found to have a positive association with lack of control [67]. It can be expected that procrastinators, who fail to regulate themselves [24,68], are pushed further by an extremely strong temporal leadership to keep up with work time and time again. Moreover, procrastinators have also been found to fail in leading a high quality of life [69].
4. The Effect of Organizational Time Norms
Organizational time norms denote the intangible and shared patterns of expected temporal activity at the organization level [19,35]. It can be considered as an organization’s time management environment which has effects on how individuals use time at work [35]. Specifically, this environment can be reflected by several dimensions related to supervision, coworker interaction, job descriptive processes, support for time management processes, and time values [70]. If the time management practices are facilitated by managers, coworkers, and the process and/or policy in organizations, employees are probably shaped to stress time-related issues (e.g., deadlines, punctuality, work speed, timing, scheduling, prioritizing, etc.) while performing duties.
Organizational time norms have a necessary connection with time-related moral issues [71], they influence employees’ time-use behaviors mainly through social pressure [35]. Specifically, emphasizing the value and effective use of time by organizations usually obliges employees to follow organizational time norms. By breaching the organizational time norms, however, employees may be confronted with the loss of reputation, being ostracized, or even laid off because of evoking intense reactions from peers [35]. For example, if time is viewed as an important resource in organizations, employees who usually perform job duties without prioritizing or fail to meet deadlines will be complained about by colleagues that collaborate with them. To avoid this undesirable consequence, employees may keep themselves working on their job duties during working hours.
Since organizational time norms might constrain employees’ time management behaviors through social pressures [35], they undermine the freedom of employees’ time allocation decisions. Given that time allocation decisions can moderate the relationship between work time and family time [21], we herein propose organizational time norms can also play a moderating role in the relationship between temporal leadership and employee extended work availability. Specifically, strong organizational time norms may heighten both the negative and positive associations between these two constructs. This is because employees under strong organizational time norms usually cannot actively decide how to utilize their time. Otherwise, they might draw undesirable reactions from peers because of their time norm breaches [35].
With the help of a moderately strong temporal leadership, employees under strong organizational time norms are less likely to confront undesirable reactions from peers regarding their time utilization. This is because a moderately strong temporal leadership usually encompasses helping employees synchronize activities with their colleagues [29,43]. Additionally, this leads employees to attend to coordinating with each other while performing job duties [72]. In addition to synchronizing, a moderately strong temporal leadership also involves helping employees allocate temporal resources better [29,43]. In this way, employees can resolve conflicts with each other within the context of existing time constraints [29,38].
However, when coupled with an extremely strong temporal leadership, strong organizational time norms could aggravate the detrimental effect of temporal leadership on employee extended work availability. On the one hand, an extremely strong temporal leadership tends to closely monitor employees’ work pace or supervise the time-use behaviors of employees. These task-oriented behaviors of a leader that strongly highlight temporality [29] may constrain employees’ autonomous decisions on how to deal with temporal challenges at work. On the other hand, strong organizational time norms usually constraints employees’ time-use behaviors through intense social pressure [35]. Within this context, employees cannot but follow the temporal requirements posed by organizations such to avoid undesirable reactions from peers [35].
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su14148778
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