There is growing interest in flexible working, not only as a means to manage labour more efficiently and for greater agility, but also as a response to increasing concerns over well-being, work-life ...balance and participation in the labour force of those with significant non-work commitments (e.g. parents, carers, older workers). As a result, a comprehensive stream of literature on the benefits and challenges of flexible working has developed and led to a body of evidence on the implementation and outcomes of different forms of flexible working arrangements. This book assesses the current state of this literature as follows:
Background: the authors review the different definitions that have been proposed, policy developments, availability and uptake.
Outcomes from flexible working: the main chapters focus on the outcomes for employers (e.g. performance, employee retention, organisational commitment etc.), as well as for individual employees (e.g. well-being, job satisfaction etc.).
Evaluation of extant knowledge: the authors comment on the existing literature and consider the methodological approaches adopted in the literature.
Conclusion: suggestions for future research are proposed.
Of interest to students, academics and policy-makers, this book provides an expert overview of the empirical evidence and offers critical commentary on the state of knowledge in the field of flexible working and new forms of work.
Interest in the outcomes of flexible working arrangements (FWAs) dates from the mid‐1970s, when researchers attempted to assess the impact of flexitime on worker performance. This paper reviews the ...literature on the link between FWAs and performance‐related outcomes. Taken together, the evidence fails to demonstrate a business case for the use of FWAs. This paper attempts to explain the findings by analysing the theoretical and methodological perspectives adopted, as well as the measurements and designs used. In doing so, gaps in this vast and disparate literature are identified, and a research agenda is developed.
•Structural combinations of forecasts are proposed.•Base models derived from exponential smoothing are used.•Seasonal (peak demand) and doule-seasonal (hourly-and half-hourly) are ...forecasted.•Forecasting performance in different horizons is encouraging.•For some forecast horizons, 30% reduction in SMAPE is observed.
This article draws from research on ensembles in computational intelligence to propose structural combinations of forecasts, which are point forecast combinations that are based on information from the parameters of the individual models that generated the forecasts. Two types of structural combination are proposed which use seasonal exponential smoothing as base models, and are applied to forecast short-term electricity demand. Although forecasting performance may depend on how ensembles are generated, results show that the proposed combinations can outperform competitive benchmarks. The methods can be used to forecast other seasonal data and be extended to different types of forecasting models.
The relationship between organizational performance and two dimensions of the ‘high performance work system’ – enriched job design and high involvement management (HIM) – is widely assumed to be ...mediated by worker well-being. We outline the basis for three models: mutual-gains, in which employee involvement increases well-being and this mediates its positive relationship with performance; conflicting outcomes, which associates involvement with increased stress for workers, accounting for its positive performance effects; and counteracting effects, which associates involvement with increased stress and dissatisfaction, reducing its positive performance effects. These are tested using the UK’s Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between enriched job design and four performance indicators, supporting the mutual gains model; but HIM is negatively related to job satisfaction and this depresses a positive relationship between HIM and the economic performance measures, supporting a counteracting effects model. Finally, HIM is negatively related to job-related anxiety–comfort and enriched job design is unrelated to it.
This paper reviews the literature on the association between lean production and performance. From this, propositions on the integration and evolution of operation and human resource management ...practices associated with the lean production concept are developed. Using 24 years of data on the use of seven core OM and HRM practices in British manufacturing firms, the potential link between integration in the use of practices and productivity is tested. In each year, three latent clusters are identified via ordered restricted latent class models; the cluster that consistently makes a more integrated use of practices outperforms the others. Furthermore, the longitudinal nature of the data permits modeling the growth curves of each practice in the sample, recognizing any similarity in growth and investigating whether or not an early integration in adoption of practices is associated with higher final productivity. The results show that pioneers are more productive, thus suggesting that the head start in integrating core OM and HRM practices associated with the lean production concept has paid off.
Studies on the impact of high-performance work systems on employees' well-being are emerging but the underlying theory remains weak. This paper attempts to develop theory of the effects on well-being ...of four dimensions of high-performance work systems: enriched jobs, high involvement management, employee voice, and motivational supports. Hypothesized associations are tested using multilevel models and data from Britain's Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 (WERS2004). Results show that enriched jobs are positively associated with both measures of well-being: job satisfaction and anxiety-contentment. Voice is positively associated with job satisfaction, and motivational supports with neither measure. The results for high involvement management are not as predicted because it increases anxiety and is independent of job satisfaction.
Purpose - Quality management requires increasing employee involvement that could empower employees, leading to employee and customer satisfaction. Although the literature describes a picture of ...increasing job demands and work intensification, the evidence of an association between employee job satisfaction and quality management remains mixed and narrow. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this link in the wider economy, and address the roles of human resource management practices that target direct employee participation (job enrichment and high involvement management) in this relationship.Design methodology approach - The Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 (WERS2004) provides information on British workplaces including the use of specific quality and human resource management practices, employees' job satisfaction and other outcomes. Latent variable analysis identifies employers' approaches to quality management, job enrichment and high involvement management. Workplace-level regression analyses illustrate the link between job satisfaction and various desired organizational outcomes. Hierarchical two-level regression models are used to assess the link between quality management at workplaces and employee job satisfaction.Findings - Although job satisfaction is positively associated with desired workplace outcomes (organizational commitment, productivity and quality), no significant link between quality management and employee job satisfaction is found. By contrast, a positive association between job enrichment and job satisfaction is confirmed, which may be weakened in the presence of quality management.Practical implications - Given the potential impact of job satisfaction on organizational outcomes, job enrichment features should not be neglected when designing jobs so that an effective quality management strategy can be in place. Some weak positive association between high involvement and quality managements with perceived job demands is also observed, and this should be further investigated in more detailed studies of employee well-being.Originality value - This is a large empirical study on an economy-wide sample of workplaces and their employees.
•A stochastic framework proposed for blended health workforce recruitment planning.•Fast numerical algorithms are proposed for finding optimal recruitment policies.•Several managerial insights are ...derived using analytical and numerical results.•Delaying advertisement for permanent positions is investigated.•A case study is conducted to show the application of framework in an inpatient ward.
There has been a significant increase in the demand for temporary skilled workers in the health sector. They provide volume flexibility, but are generally more expensive than their permanent counterparts. In this paper, we propose a two-stage stochastic optimization framework to inform recruitment decision making for a period of highly uncertain demand in a setting where all patients must be served. The first stage identifies the number of permanent positions to advertise, and the second stage determines the number of temporary workers to recruit. Our framework accounts for the uncertainty in the permanent recruitment process, stochasticity of the service delivery, and asymmetry in demand information at the times of permanent and temporary recruitment. Under a general setting of the problem, we characterize the optimal first- and second-stage decisions analytically, propose fast numerical methods for finding their values, and prove some of their monotonicity properties. A case study based on data from a geriatric ward illustrates the application of our framework, and numerical experiments provide further managerial insights.
This paper develops a new approach to forecast natural gas consumption via ensembles. It combines Bootstrap Aggregation (Bagging), univariate time series forecasting methods and modified ...regularization routines. A new variant of Bagging is introduced, which uses Maximum Entropy Bootstrap (MEB) and a modified regularization routine that ensures that the data generating process is kept in the ensemble. Monthly natural gas consumption time series from 18 European countries are considered. A comparative, out-of-sample evaluation is conducted up to 12 steps (a year) ahead, using a comprehensive set of competing forecasting approaches. These range from statistical benchmarks to machine learning methods and state-of-the-art ensembles. Several performance (accuracy) metrics are used, and a sensitivity analysis is undertaken. Overall, the new variant of Bagging is flexible, reliable, and outperforms well-established approaches. Consequently, it is suitable to support decision making in the energy and other sectors.
•A novel ensemble approach to natural gas demand forecasting is proposed.•Machine Learning and Statistics are combined to tailor time series characteristics.•Monthly data from 18 EU markets are used to assess forecasting performance.•The approach is shown to be suitable to support decision making in the energy sector.
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