By Jennifer K. Hartwell, Ph.D. Kravis Leadership Institute, Claremont McKenna College and William R. Torbert, Ph.D., Carroll School or Management, Boston College

Academic Citation: Jennifer K. Hartwell and William R. Torbert, "Leadership for Retaining Reduced-Hour Professionals," Kravis Leadership Institute Leadership Review, Winter 2004.

About the Authors: Jennifer K. Hartwell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College. Jennifer's recent research focuses on alternative work arrangements for professionals and their impacts on work/life balance and organizational effectiveness. Prior to joining the Kravis Leadership Insitute, Jennifer was co-founder of Contemporary Career Consultants, a consulting group dedicated to assisting organizational leaders in various fields, including the high-tech and medical industries, in reaching their workplace flexibility goals. She was also a researcher at Harvard University's Center for Risk Analysis. Jennifer earned a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and a M.E.S. in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Now Professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, Bill Torbert has earlier served as the school's Graduate Dean and Director of the PhD Program in Organizational Transformation. He is also a founding faculty member of the Executive Program Leadership for Change, as well as a founding Research Member of the Society for Organizational Learning, a Board Member of Trillium Asset Management (the first and largest independent Socially Responsible Investing advisor), and has consulted widely in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. His many books and articles include The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (1991), Personal and Organizational Transformations (with Dal Fisher & David Rooke, 2003), and the forthcoming Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (Berrett-Koehler, 2004).

Reduced-hour schedules are of interest today because they may enable professionals to better meet many individual, family, and organizational needs. In response to this preference and as a strategy to retain highly trained talent, and to address cost-cutting pressures some businesses have created more job flexibility by establishing reduced-hour positions (Jacobs & Gerson, 1997). Research indicates that the majority of both professional men and women who work long hours would prefer to work fewer hours (Jacobs & Gerson, 1997). For instance, professionals working between fifty and sixty hours per week prefer to work a full twenty hours less. Reduced-hours involves a reduced number of work hours on a daily or weekly basis and is a schedule where one works fewer hours than is the norm in the sector.

Because managers often refuse to accommodate their workers' needs to fulfill outside obligations, many full-time professionals quit their jobs (Christensen, 1988; Googins, 1991; Rodgers & Rodgers, 1989). In fact, retention is one of the most critical drivers in the adoption of alternative work arrangements in accounting firms, law firms, and in medical organizations. Exit interviews and other research identify long hours and difficulty balancing work and home-life as two key factors in decisions to quit one's job at accounting firms (Levy, Flynn, & Kellogg, 1998). While only 2.6% of all lawyers practice reduced hours, these work arrangements are being studied by the legal profession's executive leaders because they sense pressures mounting by particularly talented young lawyers around lifestyle issues. The trend toward using reduced-hour options is also apparent in professions like medicine (Lundgren & Barnett, 2000). The inflexible time demands and on-call responsibilities of medicine make balancing work and family life especially challenging for physicians.

Employing reduced-hour schedules in the professions as a strategy is meant to meet many individual, organizational, and professional goals. At the individual level, professionals hope to achieve higher levels of work-family balance. At the organizational level, organizational leaders aim to retain highly trained professionals, minimize the negative effects of layoffs, and create flexibility by responding more effectively to fluctuations in the demand for professionals. Finally, at the industry level, the professions hope to attract and retain the "cream of the crop." If reduced hours appears to be a win-win arrangement, then why is the literature relating reduced hours to better work-life balance and retention conflicting?

ARE REDUCED-HOURS GOOD OR BAD FOR RETENTION AND WORK-LIFE BALANCE?

Great strides have been made in making alternative work arrangements, like reduced hours, an option for today's professionals. Between 1977 and 1995, the number of firms offering some form of alternative work arrangement to its salaried employees jumped from 15% to over 73% (Center for Work & Family, 1996; Wood & Sevinson, 1990). However, it is important for organizational leaders who spear-head these arrangements to realize that empirical findings relating reduced-hour career structures to critical organizational outcomes, like retention, are inconsistent. One thing that is clear is that the reduced-hour option is not a simple quick-fix.

Some organizational scholars, psychologists, and sociologists who have been studying the relationship between work hours and psychological outcomes relevant to organizations have found that employees who work long hours report better physical health than employees who work fewer hours (Bird & Fremont, 1991). Part-time workers also report higher levels of psychological distress (Barnett, Raudenbush, Brennan, Pleck & Marshall, 1995; Hughes & Galinsky, 1994; Wethington & Kessler, 1989), and more anxiety (Kohn & Schooler, 1982) than full-time workers. Herold and Waldron (1985) found that reduced-hour schedules are related to poor mental and physical health. However, other investigations have contradicted these findings even after controlling for variables such as age, social class, household income, gender, and presence of a spouse in the home (see Barnett, 1998, for a review). For example, long hours have been related to reports of negative outcomes such as increased marital tension (Barnett, 1998) and compulsive drinking and smoking in employed mothers (Frone, Barnes, & Farrell, 1994). Similarly, full-time employment has been linked to increased anxiety levels in mothers (Hyde, Klein, Essex, & Clark, 1995).

More often than not, the length of the workweek has been related to positive indicators (Barnett, 1998), and reduced hours have been related to such negative indicators as poor mental and physical health outcomes. However, as described above, other studies yield conflicting findings. Explaining these contradictory findings is important to organizational leaders, organizational scholars, and employees, especially as professionals push for more opportunities to work reduced-hours.

WHY DO REDUCED HOURS WORK IN SOME CASES AND NOT IN OTHERS?

Conflicting findings inform us that it is not merely the number of hours worked that is critical to employees successfully integrating various work/life demands. Previously undetected psychological or organizational processes may be at play (Allen, Herst, Bruck & Sutton, 2000). Recently, several researchers have tried to explain the mixed findings between work hours and such work-related outcomes as intention to quit one's job. These studies suggest the potential in understanding the role psychological variables play in explaining how and why the number of hours worked by an employee can result in certain work-related outcomes (Barnett, Gareis, & Brennan, 1999; Barnett & Gareis, 2000; Gareis, Barnett & Brennan, in press; Hartwell, 2003; Negrey, 1993; Pitman, 1994). The findings of this research help to shed light on the psychological processes underlying the relationship between the number of hours professionals work and their intentions to leave their job as well as other important organizational outcomes. These findings need to be understood by organizational leaders who champion alternative work arrangements with the hope of achieving positive organizational outcomes.

The general consensus among social scientists with interest in work-family issues is that the subjective or perceptual meaning of reduced-hour job experiences is a better predictor than objective indicators of such work-related outcomes as intention to turn over and psychological distress (Barnett & Gareis, 2000). For example, scholars have found that subjective experiences with respect to specific job conditions are better predictors of psychological distress than is the number of hours worked (Hyde et al., 1995; Klein, Hyde, Essex, & Clark, 1998.)

At the same time, the subjective reports of reduced-hour professionals suggest some of the work-environment factors that generate stress. One reports:

There are times when colleagues publicly enjoy acknowledging my unavailability for meetings and question my commitment to organizational success. I find myself countering by making myself available at home for conference calls, even to the point of locking myself in the laundry room and feeding my children popsicles to keep them quiet.

This article suggests the type of executive and managerial leadership needed to obtain the advantages of reduced-hour work arrangements for their professionals, like increased retention. Such leadership provides the personal and organizational supports that employees need to ensure that they can design and allocate their time and energy in a way that is meaningful to them and the organization. Moreover, leaders who encourage their teams to value different types of diversity will generate an environment that respects the aspirations and achievements of reduced-hour professionals. We now review the current research that identifies the subjective aspects of reduced-hour work schedules that seem to be critical in retaining reduced-hour professionals, and then we provide a description of the type of leadership needed to realize this goal.

WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT SUBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF REDUCED-HOUR WORK?

Several important empirical investigations examine the role psychological variables play in the relationship between work hours and work-related outcomes among professionals. A quantitative analysis of a random sample of 94 Boston-area married full-time and reduced-hour female physicians, who are in dual-earner couples, and have at least one child under high-school age demonstrates that the number of hours worked, an objective job condition, is less predictive of work-related outcomes than is the subjective nature of the employment relationship (Hartwell, 2003). Specifically, employee psychological contract fulfillment (i.e., the degree to which an employee believes his or her organization has fulfilled its employer obligations) is more important than work hours in predicting: 1) burnout, 2) career satisfaction, and 3) intention to leave the organization within a year or the field of medicine within five years. The lack of relationship between work hours and several work-related outcomes, along with the strong relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and these same outcomes, suggest that the subjective or perceptual meaning of work is overwhelmingly more important in predicting outcomes of concern to organizations.

The theory and results presented in this study have important implications for the reduced-hour careers because they highlight how important overall psychological fulfillment is for both reduced-hour and full-time employees. For instance, as many as 83% of physicians who have high psychological contract fulfillment scores reported that it is not at all a concern to them that their supervisors have unrealistic expectations of them, do not support them or appreciate their work, compared with 20% of those with low psychological contract fulfillment scores. Also, physicians with high psychological contract fulfillment experience less distress due to the discrepancy between the professional activities they would like to perform and actually perform. For instance, 47% of physicians in the high group, compared with 11% in the low group, reported experiencing either no or almost no distress around this discrepancy.

Further, results suggest that reduced-hour physicians with low psychological contract fulfillment differ dramatically in several ways from those reduced-hour physicians with high levels of psychological contract fulfillment. Reduced hour physicians with low scores are much more likely than reduced-hour physicians with high scores to say: 1) that the balance between work and non-work time does not fit their needs; 2) that they are considerably or extremely concerned about being excluded from decision making at work; 3) that they feel marginalized, and 4) that they work more hours than they are paid to work.

A study of physicians (Lundgren & Barnett, 2000) and one of physician/managers (Hartwell, 1998) suggests that an employee's and employer's mutual perception of the obligations each owes the other is a critical variable in understanding the process by which work hours influence individual and organizational outcomes. Lundgren and Barnett (2000) found that physicians who choose to work reduced hours want and expect increased control and flexibility over their lives. Paradoxically, it appears from Hartwell's (1998) research that it is the managers of reduced-hour physicians who get enhanced control and flexibility from the physicians' reduced-hour schedules. Hartwell's ethnographic examination of what managers believe about reduced-hour physicians in combination with Lundgren and Barnett's findings contributes to an understanding of the potential misalignment in expectations between managers and reduced-hour physicians.

Further, the concept of "schedule fit" has received some empirical attention (Barnett et al., 1999; Gareis et al., in press; Pitman, 1994). Schedule fit is defined as a subjective assessment of how well a person's own and his or her partner's work arrangements, in terms of number and distribution of work hours, meet the person's needs and those of his or her partner and other dependents. When options at work enable "workers to realize their strategies, workers experience compatibility; when they do not, workers experience conflict" (Barnett, 1998: 167). For instance, using a sample of 141 reduced-hour physicians Barnett, Gareis, and Brennan (1999) found that schedule fit mediated the relationship between number of hours worked and burnout.

Perceived control over a person's work schedule has also been found to affect the relationship between work hours and work-related outcomes. In a qualitative study of reduced-hour workers, Negrey (1993) found that a worker's quality of life is not dependent upon the number of hours worked, but instead is, in part, dependent on the degree of perceived control he or she has over his or her work schedule.

According to Barnett and Gareis (2000), another possible explanation of the mixed findings on work hours and outcomes is that the tradeoff between giving up some aspect of work for more non-work time may be more painful for some employees than for others. They found that difficulty of tradeoffs is a more powerful predictor of psychological distress, job-role quality, intention to turn over, and intention to leave the field of medicine for reduced-hours physicians than is number of hours worked.

Friedman and Lobel (2003) argue that people who happily and willingly invest more in work in terms of time and energy are not likely to feel much conflict between work and their personal life. What's important to employees is not the hours they work but their ability to follow their passion. These employees are motivated to experience a sense of fulfillment from being true to themselves. Borrowing from researcher Bill Kahn, these scholars refer to this as "authenticity." Kahn's research shows that authentic executives and employees behave in ways that benefit people and organizations like contributing to ideas, being open and empathetic, and more productive (Kahn, 1992).

Further, in a recent study by Crouter, Bumpus, Head, and McHale (2001) men's perceptions of role overload - not their work hours - were related to the quality of their marital relationships. Two-thirds of the men in this sample were working over 50 hours per week and a quarter of the sample was working over 60 hours per week. So, even for men who work very long hours, it is still the subjective indicator, perceptions of role overload, that are most critical in predicting outcomes.

IT'S ABOUT THE MEANING OF WORK, NOT THE NUMBER OF HOURS WORKED

It becomes clear from this research that if a professional's work meets his or her subjective needs that the organization will reap the benefits of good work-related outcomes regardless of the number of hours the employee works. This seems to be especially true for reduced-hour professionals who in two of the studies (Hartwell, 2003; Barnett, Gareis, & Morgan, in press) appear to be more responsive than their full-time counterparts. In Hartwell (2003), reduced-hour physicians were more sensitive to psychological contract fulfillment in terms of their career satisfaction and intention to leave their job. Barnett, Gordon, Gareis, and Morgan (in press) also found reduced-hour physicians' intentions to leave their organization being more reactive than those of their full-time counterparts to the degree of psychological contract violations they are experiencing. In other words, if a reduced-hour physician has low psychological contract fulfillment, she is more likely to quit her job than is a full-time physician with low psychological contract fulfillment.

These studies underscore the importance of assessing subjective aspects of working reduced hours, especially in professions that esteem long work hours and total commitment. The findings suggest that organizational leaders shift their focus, at least in part, away from the number of hours their employees work, and towards cultivating and optimizing the subjective experience of work for these employees.

LEADERSHIP PRACTICES THAT CULTIVATE THE MEANING OF WORK

Given our understanding of the factors that produce positive organizational outcomes, what specific practices might organizational leaders use to elicit retention and other positive work-related outcomes from their reduced-hour employees? In this section, we describe three leadership practices that can help to create work environments that support reduced-hour workers: 1) creating a transformative culture; 2) meeting employees at the psychological level; and 3) righting incongruities between employees' and management's beliefs. We also discuss the type of organizational leader who can foster these conditions.

CREATING A TRANSFORMATIVE CULTURE

According to a recent study by Dean, Lee, MacDermid, and Buck (2000) there are three paradigms through which different organizations implement and interpret reduced-hour work: accommodation, elaboration, and transformation. "Accommodation" connotes a firm's making the most minimal adjustments in response to a request for an alternative way of working. The employer's posture in this case is to try to contain the spread of this different approach to work. "Elaboration" suggests taking a step further by developing new policies in response to these requests and by viewing reduced-hour work arrangements as a solution to high turnover among experienced, highly competent midlevel professionals at midcareer. However, firms using this paradigm did not take the extra step of developing new ways of structuring work and careers. Finally, in the "transformational" paradigm, reduced-hour arrangements were accepted with or without formal policies in place. They were seen as a normal attempt of trying to keep their best employees. "Adapting to the need of one of their 'high potentials' to work less for a while didn't faze them, because they were paying more attention to a higher-order goal-developing the best and the brightest to prepare them for the very top leadership positions in the long term."

Reduced-hour arrangements are often perceived as directly conflicting with existing professional norms. In many fields, long hours and single-minded devotion are esteemed and rewarded. Thus, what is needed is the successful transformation of existing norms and values. Leaders need to broaden the perspective that a professional's role requires single-minded devotion and create a culture that accepts and respects diverse career choices. The leader needs to broadcast this message to all employees.

MEETING EMPLOYEES AT THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LEVEL

Once a leader establishes an accepting organizational culture, it is time to encourage employees to identify and verbalize ideas that at one time might have been contrary to the organization's norms. Human resource managers ought to hold explicit, probing conversations with potential reduced-hour hires, with full-time workers contemplating a reduced-hour schedule, and with current reduced-hour employees about what they truly expect and hope to achieve by working this alternative arrangement. There needs to be an opportunity for all employees and managers alike to reveal their honest thoughts and concerns about working or managing someone who chooses to work an unusual schedule. A successful leader of both full-time and reduced-hour workers is one who helps to foster employee trust and to challenge managers and employees to communicate openly so that they can be sure there is an alignment in their understanding of each other's goals and terms. As Friedman and Lobel (2003) describe in their research about authentic leaders, to foster helpful dialogue about what is important to an employee, leaders need to assume responsibility for helping employees behave based on their values, make it comfortable for employees to talk about personal life challenges, and get to know people on a personal level. Reduced-hour employees and those who manage or work with them need to be able to ask explicit questions about the reduced-hour worker's psychological contract, their distribution of hours worked, their perceived control over their work, how painful the tradeoffs associated with working a reduced schedule are, whether they feel they are being authentic to their values, and to assess whether or not they feel role-overload. These are not simple questions and it falls upon a unique and sensitive leader to bring forth the type of culture that nurtures this type of communication.

DEDICATION TO CORRECTING INCONGRUITIES

Such conversations will uncover various incongruities. Some incongruities may demand revision of expectations on the part of the reduced-hour workers; some may demand new skills on the part of their managers; some may require new organizational policies. The successful leader will not shrink from addressing any of these issues, nor will he or she take a one-size-fits-all perspective. Further, because it is known that perceived mutual obligations, and career needs and desires change over the course of employment relationships (Robinson & Rousseau, 1994), leaders need to promote manager/employee ongoing communication. Conversations need to be revisited as employees change.

A LEADERSHIP ACTION-LOGIC THAT GENERATES SUCCESSFUL TRANSFORMATIONAL PRACTICES

It is all well and good to recommend the foregoing practices, but what is the likelihood that they will actually be implemented? Over the past twenty years, leadership research based on adult development theory has found that managers and senior executives hold one of the five different action-logics very briefly characterized in Table 1 (Fisher, Rooke & Torbert, 2003; Kegan, 1994; Torbert, 1991). Only one of these managerial action-logics intuitively appreciates the value of clarifying diverse expectations and aligning them around a shared vision or super-ordinate goal by explicitly examining incongruities. Two different sets of research studies, using two different methods, both find that only about 7% of those managers and senior executives hold that action-logic, named the Strategist action-logic in Tables 1 and 2 (Kegan, 1994; Torbert 2004).

Table 1

	Managerial Action-Logics
Opportunist	Seeks short-term, concrete advantage for self; rejects feedback, externalizes blame, manipulates others.
Diplomat	Seeks acceptance by face-to-face colleagues; observes protocol, avoids conflict to save own and other's face.
Expert	Seeks causes and perfect, efficient solutions; accepts feedback only from master of the particular craft.
Achiever	Seeks effective results by teamwork; welcomes goal-related, single-loop feedback.
Strategist	Seeks to construct shared vision, transformational conflict resolution, and timely performance through creative, witty, double-loop, reframing feedback.

Table 2 (from Fisher, Rooke & Torbert, 2003, with permission)

	Developmental Distribution of 497 Managers(across industries and organizational levels)
Opportunist	3%
Diplomat	10
Expert	45
Achiever	35
Strategist	7
	100%

A variety of field experiments and interview studies with managers and whole organizations measured at different developmental action-logics have shown that only those leaders who transform through the earlier action-logics to the Strategist action-logic reliably: 1) listen into the full diversity of their colleagues; 2) develop shared superordinate visions; 3) delegate in a collaborative, inquiring manner; 4) reframe issues collaboratively; and 5) successfully lead organizational transformation efforts (Fisher & Torbert, 1991; Merron, Fisher & Torbert, 1987; Rooke & Torbert, 1998).

Paradoxically, then, we need to help leaders to transform to the Strategist action-logic if they are to help reduced-hour professionals to clarify their subjective needs and to be treated as significant contributors with a meaningful future in the organization. But only leaders who already hold the Strategist action-logic will be reliably helpful in helping other leaders to transform, and there are relatively few such leaders today.

REFERENCES

Allen, T.D., Herst, D.E.L., Bruck, C.S., & Sutton, M. 2000. Consequences associated with work-to-family conflict: A review and agenda for future research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5: 278-308.