Working from home may not improve work-life balance for everyone, study finds
Even though working from home, known as teleworking, may improve an employee’s work-life balance, a recent study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior has found that it sometimes may have the opposite effect, especially when the employee is forced to work from home.
Professor Laurent M. Lapierre, of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, led a team that studied 251 financial sales professionals who were recently required to work from home most of the time. They surveyed the employees one month before, three months after, and one year after the company implemented a cost-saving measure that eliminated employee access to a central office.
The study aimed to gauge whether the employees would experience greater work-family conflict (work demands interfering with family obligations) when forced to work from home more often. “Several studies have shown a link between higher work-family conflict and decreased job satisfaction and performance, adverse health impacts, and higher employee turnover,” said Lapierre. The researchers found that some employees experienced significantly more work-family conflict after they were forced to work from home.
However, the study revealed that the level of work-family conflict experienced varied considerably from one employee to the next. Those who were not very confident in their ability to successfully balance work and family obligations at the onset of the new policy were most likely to report the highest increase in work-family conflict. In contrast, employees who were initially more confident in their ability to balance work and family saw no change in their levels of work-family conflict when they began working from home more often.
Taking these results into consideration, Lapierre recommends that companies proceed cautiously when implementing policies that force staff to work from home: doing so may cause problems that outweigh the savings in overhead.
Also, Lapierre urges managers to improve their employees’ confidence in balancing work and family obligations. He recommends offering employees advice that is tailored to their specific needs, providing them with examples of successful work-family balance strategies, and recognizing the employees’ efforts to balance both roles. Doing so should help ensure that telework, whether imposed or not, is of greatest value to both employees and their employers.
Highlights of recent research
Professors at the Telfer School recently made a number of outstanding contributions to diverse fields such as organizational behaviour, business history, health systems and quantitative finance. Here are some highlights of these scholarly contributions published over the last two months.
- Réal Labelle, Taïeb Hafsi, and Claude Francoeur of HEC and Walid Ben Amar, Telfer School contribute new insights on the connection between ownership and corporate structure with their study of family firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSP). The authors compare family firms’ CSP to that of non-family firms and examine two potential contributing factors: level of family control and the governance orientation of the country in which the firm operates. The full study is available on website of the Journal of Business Ethics.
- Qiu Chen published a study in Contemporary Accounting Research on director monitoring of expense misreporting in nonprofit organizations; specifically the effects of expense disclosure transparency, donor evaluation focus and organization performance. This research was recently featured in the most recent edition of uOttawa Experts.
- Craig Kuziemsky guest edited a special themed issue of the Journal of Professional Care, on interprofessional informatics, with Connie Delaney and Barbara Brandt, University of Minnesota. In their lead-in editorial the authors discuss the need for integration between informatics and interprofessional practice and interprofessional education (IPP/IPE) to drive healthcare transformation. Professor Kuziemsky’s NSERC-funded research focuses on developing a novel methodological approach for integrating the diverse information flows and work processes of collaborative healthcare teams.
- Laurent Lapierre published a study in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour, with colleagues from Utrecht University, “Juggling work and family responsibilities when involuntarily working more from home: A multiwave study of financial sales professionals.” The study is available on the journal’s website, at this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/job.2075/full. In other news, Professor Lapierre was also recently appointed as one of the Associate Editors of the Journal of Business and Psychology.
- Tiemei Li of the Telfer School coauthored an article in the LSE Business Review, published by the London School of Economics and Political Science. The article asks “Are firms with offshore headquarters worth more?” No, write Art Durnev (University of Iowa), professor Tiemei Li and Michel Magnan (Concordia); but onshore firms are valued higher if they have offshore subsidiaries. The article was based on their findings published in the Journal of Corporate Finance
- A team of five professors – 3 from Telfer – published a study in the journal Business History on family business development in mainland China from 1872 to 1949. The analysis by Cheryl S. McWatters, Qiu Chen and Shujun Ding of Telfer, Wenxuan Hou, University of Edinburgh and Zhenyu Wu, University of Winnipeg, drew on perspectives from recent research on Chinese history, business development, and social change, both in English and in Chinese. More information is available at this link.
- Finally, congratulations to professors François-Éric Racicot of Telfer and Raymond Théoret of UQAM, who published a study in the Journal of Banking and Finance, a leading journal. In their study “Macroeconomic shocks, forward-looking dynamics, and the behavior of hedge funds,” the team investigated how hedge funds’ strategies react, as a group, to macroeconomic risk and uncertainty. More information about this study is available online.
Getting to the bottom of financial disclosure issues in the not-for-profit sector
Professor Qiu Chen has just published research examining a key transparency issue in the nonprofit sector: to increase opportunities for donations, some managers misreport fundraising and/or administrative expenses as program expenses.
Chen set out to determine what happens to director monitoring in such scenarios. She found that when nonprofits underperform financially, directors “understand that their fiduciary duty is to both monitor managers and work with them to raise funds. Under these circumstances, directors are found to compromise their monitoring to help managers impress donors,” said Chen, an assistant professor in accounting and CPA Ontario Fellow.
Concerns had been voiced about transparency in the sector but the research was still developing when Chen started her Ph.D, at Queen’s University in 2009. In response to well-publicized accounting scandals the academic focus on nonprofits had matured by the time Chen completed her doctorate in 2011. The following year the American Accounting Association launched a journal dedicated to governmental andnonprofit accounting. The industry had arrived at a critical juncture on a whole range of accounting-related issues: social responsibility, accounting standards, political activities and auditing – all areas that Chen is researching.
The upturn in interest in nonprofits is welcome because there is a longstanding myth that nonprofits are small, or somehow less worthy of study, than private sector firms, says Chen. “There is little basis for saying so, as a large number of charities, many of them headquartered here in Ottawa, are of considerable scale,” says Chen. The accounting quality issues in these organizations do not appear to be “more or less prevalent as in the private sector.” However, the issues “do come up in very different contexts, where charitable goals and donor expectations are strong drivers of people’s motivations and behaviours, not always in optimal ways.”
Chen carried out an experiment with 189 nonprofit directors. She noted that two factors, the evaluation approach of donors and the transparency level of organizations’ expense disclosures, can impact director monitoring. When directors perceived that donors were adopting a more balanced approach to organizational evaluation, one focused on both financial and nonfinancial performance, they monitored less. “But enhanced transparency of expense disclosures increased director monitoring,” Chen explained; “it appeared to reduce the tendency to accept management expense misreporting.”
Balanced donor evaluations are generally preferable to financially focused ones. On the other hand, they do not encourage directors to reduce expense misreporting in nonprofits, the findings of this study show. Moreover, transparent expense disclosures in nonprofits’ financial statements improve director monitoring of management, contrary to what some observers have claimed. The implication for regulators is clear: “Probably transparent expense disclosures should be mandatory, rather than voluntary.”
Study by Shantanu Dutta Delves into the Media’s Influence on Deal Outcomes
While the media are considered to play an influential role in business, very little research has been done on the relationship between firm-specific media coverage and corporate decision making. The Telfer School’s Shantanu Dutta is helping to change that with a new study on how business reporting shapes firms’ merger and acquisition decisions.
“Our preliminary evidence suggests that the media do influence deal outcomes, independently of the market’s response to a given M&A play,” notes Dutta, an associate professor of finance at the Telfer School. “In particular, the press has something of a ‘corporate governance’ role, one that has not been explored much empirically.”
Dutta and his team seek to understand better how reporting in reputable newspapers might affect the probability of making a deal – and the degree to which negative coverage has a restraining effect. But they are also looking into the impact of coverage on other strategic decisions in M&A, “such as the acquiring firm’s payment method, and the impact on future acquisitions.”
The 2008-2009 global financial crisis sparked interest among finance researchers in the role of the press. After the financial crisis, traditional measures of firm performance no longer appeared adequate. In response, some finance researchers began to examine how verbal information contained in media reports provides information over and above the traditional performance measures.
The findings from the study will encourage a better understanding about the linkages between media coverage and M&A decision making processes among investors and managers, says Dutta.
“We recognize that business reporting is not the only factor that influences major corporate decisions, but it certainly has the potential to play a significant role in shaping managers' and investors' perceptions.”
Recent publications and scholarly contributions of note at the Telfer School
Telfer School of Management faculty have produced a number of studies in influential journals over the past few months. Here are some of them, along with other notable recognitions and contributions.
Research contributions
Alhassan Abdullahi Ohiomah, Morad Benyoucef and Pavel Andreev won a Distinguished Paper Award at this year’s Conference of Information System and Applied Science Research (CONISAR 2015). Led by Ohiomah, Ph.D. candidate in E-Business, the research conceptualizes how lead management systems drive inside sales performance. (November 2015).
In “The cost of growth: small firms and the pricing of bank loans,” Anoosheh Rostamkalaei and Mark Freel drew upon data from the 2007 UK Survey of SME Finance to study the extent to which growth firms are discriminated against on price in loan markets. (October 2015 in Small Business Economics).
A recent article in the Journal of Knowledge Management identifies and lists 100 "citation classics" in the area of knowledge management. An article by Emeritus Professor Swee Goh on managing effective knowledge transfer was on the list (ranked at #8) as was an article co-authored by Professor Mark Freel on entrepreneurial learning in SMEs (#15).
Samir Saadi is a coauthor with Xiaoya (Sara) Dinga, Yang Nib and Abdul Rahman in a study that builds on recent research on linking changes in housing prices to investors’ degree of risk aversion. This is the first study to establish an association between growth rates in housing prices and firms’ cost of equity capital. (December 2015 in the Journal of Banking and Finance).
Sylvain Durocher of Telfer and Yves Gendron, Université Laval and Claire-France Picard, Université Laval examined how small practitioners perceive and react to global standards of practice and the underlying mechanisms put in place by the accounting profession to ensure "appropriate" implementation. (Online early in Auditing: a Journal of Practice and Theory)
Management practice
José Carlos Marques and Henry Mintzberg published an article in the magazine MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Why Corporate Social Responsibility Isn’t a Piece of Cake.” “Although corporations can play important roles in addressing some of society’s problems,” the authors write, “it’s naïve to think that corporate social responsibility can turn the corporate landscape into a win-win wonderland.”
A study by Lavagnon Ika, “Critical success factors for World Bank projects: An empirical investigation,” was cited by The Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), which evaluates the effectiveness of the World Bank Group in addressing development challenges. IEG cited Ika’s article while setting out the scope of a forthcoming report on what can be learned from recent evaluations of the World Bank-funded projects about their results and performance.
At Treasury Board Secretariat, Michael Parent made a presentation to senior managers entitled “IT Project and Cybersecurity Risk Governance.” A new professor in marketing at Telfer, Parent has expertise in e-business, cybersecurity, and governance practices at the board level.
