Linking Organizational Flexibility with Health Behaviors: Do Gender, Spillover and Family Contexts Matter?

Drawing on two waves of data six months apart (before and after an organizational flexibility initiative), this paper examines the impacts of this innovation on changes in work-home spillover and health-related outcomes of women and men working at the Midwest headquarters of a large US retail corporation, as well as whether baseline home and spillover contexts moderate this relationship. Based on different dimensions of work-home spillover reported at Wave 1 (positive, negative home to work and work to home spillover), we identify three distinct spillover contexts at baseline: high negative spillover, high positive spillover, and low spillover. We also identify five distinct home ecological contexts in which employees live, based on home demands and home control. Multivariate analyses show that a major flexibility initiative (ROWE - Results Only Work Environment) reduces negative work-to-home spillover for those in particular home contexts: singles with high home control, adult care providers with low home control, and parents of preschoolers with low home control. It also reduces the negative work-to-home spillover of workers who were experiencing overall high negative spillover or high positive spillover at baseline. ROWE promotes health behaviors such as increasing the odds of quitting smoking, decreasing alcohol consumption frequency, increasing exercise frequency, and improving self-assessed adequate time for meals and for sleep. The latter two are partially mediated via reduced negative work-to-home spillover. ROWE especially improves the health behavior of singles with high home control and of employees who previously reported high levels of positive spillover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]