Riassunto analitico
The world of work has undergone some major transformations that have deeply changed what, until a few years ago, was usually meant by working, which implied being physically available in the workplace for a fixed amount of time. A few years later, the boundaries of this definition have dramatically blurred out. This thesis work explores the relationship between a new type of work organization, the so-called “New Ways of Working”, characterized by temporal and spatial flexibility, and employee work-life balance, to assess whether more control over the time and place of work, combined with the use of ICTs, has an impact on the conciliation between work and non-work life. I modelled my research on the European Working Conditions Survey (6th wave, 2015), which comes in support of the analysis with extensive data on the topic, used to run OLS regressions to empirically test the potential impact of NWW on a selection of 10 European countries and other two subsamples including Nordic countries together with the Netherlands, and Italy. Several control variables are used to check for the robustness of the results, which include gender, parental status, level of education, occupation, and whether respondents were paid based on their performance at work. Results for the general sample show that there is a significant relationship between all three dimensions with WLB. In particular, worktime control is positively correlated to WLB at the 0,1% level, while workplace flexibility and ICTs are negatively correlated to WLB at the 0,1% and 5% level respectively (R2=0,28). These results suggest that being able to control work schedules might be a more effective measure to improve the fit between work and private life compared to being able to work in various locations. They also suggest that the benefits of using ICTs for work are outweighed by its negative effects leading to more work-into-family conflict. When carrying out the analysis for the other two subsamples, the model yielded similar results in the Nordics/Netherland sample (R2=0,30), which did not happen, however, in the case of Italy, with a consistent drop in the R2 (0,18) that suggest that further research is required to explore what are the factors explaining work-life balance issues in that country.
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Abstract
The world of work has undergone some major transformations that have deeply changed what, until a few years ago, was usually meant by working, which implied being physically available in the workplace for a fixed amount of time. A few years later, the boundaries of this definition have dramatically blurred out. This thesis work explores the relationship between a new type of work organization, the so-called “New Ways of Working”, characterized by temporal and spatial flexibility, and employee work-life balance, to assess whether more control over the time and place of work, combined with the use of ICTs, has an impact on the conciliation between work and non-work life. I modelled my research on the European Working Conditions Survey (6th wave, 2015), which comes in support of the analysis with extensive data on the topic, used to run OLS regressions to empirically test the potential impact of NWW on a selection of 10 European countries and other two subsamples including Nordic countries together with the Netherlands, and Italy. Several control variables are used to check for the robustness of the results, which include gender, parental status, level of education, occupation, and whether respondents were paid based on their performance at work. Results for the general sample show that there is a significant relationship between all three dimensions with WLB. In particular, worktime control is positively correlated to WLB at the 0,1% level, while workplace flexibility and ICTs are negatively correlated to WLB at the 0,1% and 5% level respectively (R2=0,28). These results suggest that being able to control work schedules might be a more effective measure to improve the fit between work and private life compared to being able to work in various locations. They also suggest that the benefits of using ICTs for work are outweighed by its negative effects leading to more work-into-family conflict. When carrying out the analysis for the other two subsamples, the model yielded similar results in the Nordics/Netherland sample (R2=0,30), which did not happen, however, in the case of Italy, with a consistent drop in the R2 (0,18) that suggest that further research is required to explore what are the factors explaining work-life balance issues in that country.
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