FLEXIBLE WORK ARRANGEMENTS

Flexible Work Arrangements

Flexible Work Arrangements

In the past, women failing to “achieve” or “succeed” in a manner in keeping with traditional male career development models have been labelled as having a lower need for achievement than men (Veroff et al., 1953). However, such assertions have been widely and roundly refuted (Fitzgerald and Crites, 1980; Marshall, 1984; White et al., 1992).

Fitzgerald and Crites (1980), for instance, claim that despite having success in predicting and explaining achievement-related behaviour in males, classical theories of achievement motivation have been less satisfactory when applied to females because such theories have been constructed by and for men. In a similar vein, Herriot (1992) asserts that management theorists of the past have sought to show that all people were motivated by a similar need or value, the need for vertical career progression. These theorists downplayed the range of individual differences that exist, perhaps because their underlying purpose was to help organizations to devise systems which treated employees alike, as “you can design work or reward systems which apply across the board only if you assume that people want the same things out of work” (p. 59). In this way, individuals are seen to be interested in achieving only if they subscribe to traditional male conceptions of achievement and success. However, such traditional conceptions of achievement and success have a limited shelf-life when applied to women's personal and professional lives as women utilize a range of measures of career achievement which differ significantly from those used by men (Powell and Mainiero, 1992).

Various sources point to a tendency for men to use objective measures of career success such as salary, rank or promotion while women measure their success in both professional and personal arenas through subjective measures such as personal and/or professional satisfaction, perceived quality or sense of growth or development (Powell and Mainiero, 1992; White et al., 1992). Women's preference for subjective measures of success can be attributed to the fact that they have traditionally used subjective rather than objective factors (e.g. marital status, number of children, number of close friends or frequency of contact) to measure the success of relationships. Therefore, “in the same vein, satisfaction with career, defined in terms of its perceived quality, may be more important than objective career achievements as measured by promotions, salary increments, and the like” (Powell and Mainiero, 1992, p. 220). Scase and Goffee (1989) argue that this preference for challenge and job satisfaction over promotion could also result from women being less inclined to plan careers consciously and meticulously, being more accustomed as they are to unpredictable experiences such as pregnancy, blocked career paths or moving with their partner's career. Findings from White et al.'s (1992) study of successful women provide support for the existence of women's desire to achieve and for gendered differences in perceptions of career success.

The authors found that all women in the study expressed a high need for achievement. However, when describing their perceptions of career success, these women placed greater emphasis ...