associated with all three is whether management takes a consultative approach to
employees, measured by the extent to which it regularly consults through a formal
channel on a range of issues (such as health and safety, productivity, training,
technology, and work organization). Yet its relationship to family-orientedXexible
management is not particularly strong. There are also sectoral diVerences. Both
family-oriented Xexible management and equal-opportunity management are
signiWcantly more likely to be found in the public sector. In contrast, high-
involvement management is less likely in the public sector. Within the private
sector itself, high-involvement management is signiWcantly more prevalent in
Wnancial services and signiWcantly less likely to be used extensively in manufactur-
ing, construction, hotels and restaurants, transport and communication, other
business services, and other community services.
In addition, organizations with human resource departments are more likely to
have family-orientedXexible management and equal-opportunity management,
but are less likely to have high-involvement management. The size of the work-
place, as measured by the number of employees, is positively related only to equal-
opportunity management. But the size of the larger organization, of which the
workplace is a part, is related to both family-oriented Xexible management
and high-involvement management. In the case of family-oriented Xexible
management, organizations with over 5 , 000 employees are signiWcantly more likely
to adopt it, while in the case of high-involvement management, organizations with
100 or more employees are more likely to practice it than organizations with
less than 100 employees. The proportion of the workforce that consists of managers
is positively associated with both equal-opportunity and high-involvement
management, while the proportion of the workforce that consists of women is
positively linked to family-friendly management, and weakly related to high-
involvement management.
- 3 The Association Between Family-Friendly, Equal-
Opportunity, and High-Involvement Management
and Performance in WERS 98We can only test the impact of identiWable phenomena. It is thus not possible to
assess whether the integrated approach is associated with superior performance.
We therefore tested the associations involving family-orientedXexible manage-
ment, equal-opportunity management, high-involvement management, and the
individual work-enrichment and motivational measures. We assessed these asso-
ciations on three economic performance measures—Wnancial performance, labor
productivity, and change in labor productivity—and two human resource outcome
measures—labor turnover and absenteeism.
592 stephen wood and lilian m. de menezes