Work longer or live smarter? striving for desirable work time arrangements in diverse cultural contexts

Abstract

The long working hours and their noxious effects seem to be more prevalent in today’s competitive global business world. This chapter thus explores the joint role of personal choice and social welfare provision in the context of working hours and work attitudes across a wide range of countries with diverse levels of economic development, cultural background, and welfare regimes. Secondary analysis was employed using data collected from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), with a sample of 8,525 employees from nine countries. These countries represent four types of social welfare regimes: the social democratic welfare (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway), liberal welfare (United States and Australia), conservative corporatist welfare (France and Germany), and the East Asian welfare (Taiwan and South Korea). I found that the fit between desired and actual working hours was associated with higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment. However, this association did vary across different social welfare regimes. Logistic regression further revealed that compared against the East Asian welfare regime, employees in countries with social democratic, conservative, and liberal welfare systems were more likely to experience a fit between personal preferences and actual choices of working hours. Furthermore, after controlling for the macro-level social institutional factors and micro-level demographics, personal financial needs of "wanting to earn less" could still predict the state of misfit. Recommendations are thus made to organizations to facilitate a state of fit between individual preferences and available choices through supplying multiple options to employees.