A lot is made these days of the importance of creating a flexible work environment so that employees can develop a better work-life interface. Flextime, telecommuting, compressed work weeks, and other innovations in work schedules are supposed to assist employees in managing their demands across different life domains – without having to sacrifice productivity.

Unfortunately, a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal suggests that manager assumptions about why employees utilize work flexibility practices can bias a manager’s perceptions of evaluations of those employees.

If managers believe employees utilize flexible work practices for productivity reasons, they are likely to make positive attributions about employees regarding their commitment to the organization. On the other hand, if managers believe employees utilize flexible work practices for personal reasons, they are likely to make significantly less positive attributions about employees regarding their commitment to the organization.

Therefore, two people in an organization can utilize the exact same flexible work benefit and be evaluated – even by the same manager – in a very different light, regardless of actual differences in productivity or work quality. This can have implications for employee career progression within an organization, because manager evaluations and recommendations often carry a fair amount of influence. If the manager believes an employee lacks commitment to the organization s/he may not provide the strong recommendation needed for promotion. Employees may be missing out on promotion opportunities, while organizations may fail to capitalize on the full potential of some employees.

To address this situation, employees need to ensure that they know where their manager stands with regard to flexible work practices. Just because an organization has a policy that permits the use of flexible work practices doesn’t mean that utilizing those practices comes without a cost to the employee. Here are some suggestions:

• Build rapport with your manager. Your manager is less likely to make negative assumptions about you if s/he has respect for you and your performance.
• Make sure you are not shortchanging the business. Working from home or flextime can lend themselves to abuse fairly easily – even if that abuse is unintended (e.g., too many people drop by knowing you are working from home, which disrupts your concentration and focus). You are accountable for managing your work flexibility appropriately.
• Ensure you show the business results for your productivity. All too often, employees assume that managers can “see” how much more productive they are when they have increased flexibility. Sometimes, though, it can be good to show managers the evidence to help them reach that conclusion. Don’t rely on your manager to look for it.

And there is something the organization can do as well. Work with managers to understand the benefits of the flexible work practices within the organization. Top-down decisions regarding flexible working are likely to be met with resistance at various levels of the managerial hierarchy. If you fail to get members of that hierarchy on the same page, the benefits of work flexibility for the organization will likely be reduced, and if there is too much resistance, work flexibility may show no benefits at all. Therefore, organizations need to remember to utilize proper change management techniques when trying to create a more flexible work environment.

Accountability is important to work flexibility. Employees need to be held accountable for their performance when they exercise flexibility. Managers need to be held accountable for their behaviors regarding flexible working for their employees. And senior leaders need to be held accountable for ensuring that flexible work practices are implemented in ways that are good for the organization and its employees.

I recently put together a proposal for a panel session that would bring a group of scholars and practitioners together to discuss issues related to the work-life interface. One of the experts on my proposed panel serves as an external consultant to organizations, and she mentioned that many people who work internally in organizations tend to have a very negative opinion of academics who conduct research in the area of the work-life interface. The argument is that many academics spend their time studying issues that have little to no practical value to organizations.

Of course, I would never put myself, or many other academics I work with, into that particular box. However, I know that there are an awful lot of academics who do fall into that stereotype of the “ivory tower” academic.

That got me thinking about my own philosophy and what I try to do as a professional. I was trained under the scientist-practitioner philosophy, which means that my work, whether it is consulting organizations or teaching students, is based in research, and, conversely, my research paradigm emphasizes the practical realities of organizational life.

None of this is to say that I lack an interest in understanding the inner workings of people – after all, I am a psychologist. I believe that basic research has led to many advances that have practical implications, but I also recognize that a lot of “applied” research has become so narrowly focused, and sometimes needlessly sophisticated, that it has the potential to render itself irrelevant to practitioners.

I know I’m not the only scientist-practitioner out there. I was trained to be a scientist-practitioner, so my teachers and mentors were scientist-practitioners themselves. I even work with several individuals that fit into that category, and I have a host of contacts whom I would identify as true scientist-practitioners as well. We do exist!

However, if applied psychology refuses to constantly pay attention to the “gap” between science and practice, then it runs the risk of rendering itself irrelevant to many people who deal with the day-to-day realities in organizations. And, if practitioners who deal with those day-to-day realities refuse to pay attention to solid research, then they run the risk of creating substantially less effective programs that are guided more by heuristics than sound science.

So, we have today the same struggle that has confronted applied psychology since its inception. We must constantly scrutinize the divide between scientific research and practical realities. Practitioners need to learn from researchers and utilize sound scientific processes when designing new initiatives and programs. Researchers, for their part, need to devote more resources toward the study of issues that concern practitioners and do a better job of communicating results in a way that is meaningful to people working in organizations. It sounds like a tall order, but if scientist-practitioners become more common in academia and in organizations, they can begin to diminish the gap and strengthen the relationship between science and practice.

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In today’s market landscape, creating an effective work-life interface is essential as a way of managing stress. A recent poll in the UK found that more people ranked work-life balance as a top priority when looking for a new job (at 36%, the highest result in the poll) than they did a competitive salary (at 31%). Similar polls in the US and around the world continue to find that people crave a better interface between the work and non-work lives.

What does this mean?

It means that many workers around the world are struggling to keep the stress and demands of their work lives from spilling over into their home lives. Some organizations provide greater levels of flexibility (such as flextime or telecommuting) that permit employees to better manage and juggle their work and personal life demands. That can be an effective tool, if you (a) have access to flexible workplace practices, and (b) possess the personality and competency necessary to utilize them effectively.

Instead, though, some people try to ‘get more done’ by working on two or more tasks at the same time. We see it all the time. People talk on the phone while checking their email. People will be an active participant in a meeting and shift their attention back and forth between the meeting and information coming in on their smartphones. We affectionately refer to this as multitasking.

Is multitasking really an effective way of ‘getting more done’? The research on this topic says, unequivocally, NO! For example, I recently posted elsewhere that multitasking can decrease performance by as much as 40%.

In a recent study my colleagues and I completed, we found that people who responded to emails while checking their voicemail messages responded to 19% fewer emails that people who did not have the distraction of checking their voicemail messages. Furthermore, the multitasking resulted in a decrease of 18% in the accuracy of email responses. So, not only did multitasking slow people down, it also lowered the quality of their work.

Perhaps even more damning was the fact that multitasking resulted in increased levels of stress and negative mood. So, not only did performance suffer, but so did multitaskers’ well-being.

The conclusion we can draw from all of this is that multitasking is not an effective way to ‘get more done.’ It also is not an effective way of decreasing the stress that results from a poor work-life interface. All you do is end up less efficient and more stressed. I’m pretty sure that is self-defeating!

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Do you remember the shootings at Columbine? Did you hear about the recent shooting at the University of Alabama? Both of these events – and many others just like them – are horrific tragedies. Whenever these types of events occur, it seems that psychologists rush to the scene to “explain” why they happened.

For example, after the Columbine shootings, social psychologists rushed out to explain the behavior as a function of low self-esteem. As a consequence, over the past decade we have been inundated with attempts to ensure that we help maintain people’s self-esteem so that they won’t engage in a similar behavior. Yet, a retrospective analysis of events leading up to the incident suggests that high self-esteem may have been more of a culprit than low self-esteem.

Regardless of which side of the self-esteem fence you find yourself on, one fact is very much ignored by those that seek to explain the incident: Previous research does little or no good in helping us to predict these extreme events. Whether it is a school shooting, workplace violence, a terrorist act, or a high school athlete who dies of a rare genetic defect, all of these events fall outside the scope of what contemporary researchers examine.

Before you jump all over me, remember that I, myself, conduct applied and laboratory research all the time. However, I also know the limits of that research.

In research, we use analytic methods that usually require us to exclude participants who are at the extremes. Such cases are called “outliers.” and when they are drastically different from the other people we are studying, they have an inordinate influence on the effects we observe in our research. Hence, in many cases, the practice of removing outliers helps to avoid cases where a very small number of people can bias our results in one direction or another.

However, the practice of eliminating outliers also has unintended consequences for generalizing our results. Most (though not all) research emphasizes people who do not fall outside the scope of what we would deem to be “normal” or “average.” So, to attempt to explain behavior from the “outliers” responsible for the Columbine shootings based on the enormous amount of self-esteem research conducted on “average” individuals is actually to draw inappropriate conclusions.

You see the same problems when trying to explain terrorism and workplace violence. You cannot study moderate members of a group and then attempt to explain the behavior of extreme members of that group. It just doesn’t work (though many psychologists would lose their camera time if people acknowledged this).

Does this mean that research is useless in predicting behavior? Well, the answer to that is not so clear cut. Research is useful only in predicting the behavior of people who have been studied. Because extreme behaviors do not become a popular focus of study until after the extreme behavior has occurred, it is difficult to study these behaviors before they occur. Furthermore, because actual incidents of workplace violence are few and far between, it would be difficult to study these incidents systematically. So, all we can do is try to see what led up to some extreme incident and do our best to re-construct it.

But, looking at things after the fact (post hoc) brings about its own problems. This archival approach typically leads to a constructivist perspective, which can be fraught with bias (conscious or unconscious) and errors.

This is no more evident than in the plethora of books touting some organization or company as great or wonderful. When the company that is touted as great or wonderful explodes, such as in the case of Enron, the constructivist flaw becomes obvious (though some “researchers” simply use this as the springboard to write another book about why they really weren’t wrong to begin with).

So, my caution for psychologists and other mental health professionals is twofold.

1. If you are seeking to explain an extreme incident, make sure that any research you use to support your “reasons for why it happened” actually specifically studied the type of incident to which you are referring. Very few studies on workplace bullying will be useful in predicting extreme responses to workplace bullying. Don’t over-generalize if it hasn’t been studied.
2. When working one on one with a client (as in counseling or clinical psychology), don’t assume that what comes out of that interaction necessarily applies to other clients or to people in general. One of the things we know about research is that sometimes tailored interventions for an individual work because of the idiosyncrasies of that person, but they don’t necessarily generalize beyond that person. So, don’t assume that what works for one will work for all, or that what works with extreme patients will do anything for the average person. That just isn’t how it works.

As for you (the average reader), when someone tries to explain away extreme behavior using previous research, consider whether that extreme behavior is something that could have been studied in the past. If not, ignore them.

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