Organizational Measures As Key: Who Introduces Family Friendly Work Practices and Why?

The workplace and the existing range of Family Friendly Work Practices (FFWP) are key to enable parents to balance work and family. Nevertheless, research investigating the patterns and motivation of organizations to introduce FFWP for their employees is scarce and theory driven quantitative research is even scarcer. Against this background the paper examines the role of structural elements of organizations for the introduction of FFWP: firm size, sector, share of female workforce and share of highly skilled staff.

Our hypotheses are derived from competing neo-institutional and rational choice arguments: neo-institutionalism would emphasize the need for organizations to maintain their legitimacy vis-à-vis their organizational environment. We would thus expect large firms and public sector organizations to be most likely to introduce official FFWP on grounds of being under intense public scrutiny. Rational choice theory, in contrast, focuses on efficiency. Following this second line of reasoning, we would expect small firms, organizations with a high share of female workforce and organizations with a high share of highly skilled and specialized employees to be most likely to offer FFWP.

We test our hypotheses, using official longitudinal data from the German Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Linked Employer-Employee Data of the IAB (LIAB) which is representative for the German labor market. Germany is a uniquely informative setting for testing our competing hypotheses. Since, during our window of observation (1993-2014), work-family norms and policies have shifted in the direction of stronger dual-earner family support. These changes should be associated with contradicting influences on organizational behavior: intensified legitimacy pressures resulting in rising FFWP or relief from providing FFWP out of efficiency.

Preliminary results support the neo-institutional perspective, large employers tend to offer more FFWP than middle and small companies. Further analyses will address the aspect of change over time.