384 Chapter 10 Stress and Worker Well-Being balance those hours across davs.For example,the employee may be at the workplace from 7:00 a.m.to 5:00 pm.on Monday and Tuesday,from 9:00 am.to 3:00 p.m.on Wednesday and Thursday,and from 10:00 a.m.to 6:00 p.m.on Friday.Even though workers have the option of varying the time at which they arrive and depart,some research has suggested that the reality is less dramatic than the possibilities.Ronen (1981)found that after the intro- duction of flextime,the average arrival time for workers was 8 minutes later than it had been before and the average departure time was 22 minutes later. The benefits of flextime to the individual worker are obvious.In addition to the psycho- logical advantages of perceiving some control over the work schedule (e.g.not having to worry if one is stuck in traffic en route to work).there is the practical advantage of achiev. ing a better balance between work and non-work (eg.being able to take a child to a special school event).Most workers express satisfaction with flextime schedules. Compressed Workweek Comgressed woreek Another nontraditional work schedule is the compressed workweek.which permits an S业恤式P在精 employee to work for longer than eight hours a day and fewer than five days a week.A com- mon plan is the 4/10 plan,which permits a worker to accumulate the 40 hours of the work- an eight hours a da每and week in four days.For some workers,this affords the opportunity to enjoy an ongoing series of three-day weekends.For others,it permits them to take second jobs or pursue further education on a more regular basis while still working A 2008 national sample of companies found that 35 percent offered workers the possibility of a compressed workweek (Tang MacDermid-Wadsworth,2008).This type of schedule is found most commonly in manu- facturing organizations(Baltes et al,1999). Consequences of Flextime and Compressed Workweek Schedules Worker satisfaction with flextime and compressed workweek schedules is well docu- mented (Landy,1989).But are these work schedules associated with organizational out- comes such as productivity,performance,and absenteeism?The process of creating and maintaining nontraditional work schedules inevitably incurs some administrative costs,so organizations may well ask,"What's in it for us?"Baltes and colleagues(1999)conducted a meta-analysis of 39 studies on the effects of flextime (27 studies)and compressed work- weeks(12 studies).The results of the analysis are useful and encouraging for both of these scheduling variations.They found that flextime was associated with higher productivity and lower absenteeism,although the impact on absenteeism was considerably greater than the effect on productivity.For the compressed workweek,they found that while absentee- ism was unaffected,supervisors'ratings of performance were higher(though productivity was not). Baltes and colleagues(1999)did some further analyses of their data and found that flex. time had little effect on productivity.performance ratings,or absenteeism for professionals and managers such as accountants or sales managers.In addition,they found that,for non- professional and nonsales managerial workers,programs with extremely flexible hours were less effective than more conservative programs.They concluded that this was proba- bly the result of the inability of employees in the workplace to communicate with absent employees.This would,of course,be particularly troublesome in organizations that depend heavily on teams and groups as opposed to single contributors.They also found that the effects of flextime tended to diminish after the initial period of adjustment(typically a few months):as workers became accustomed to the new scheduling.it became the norm. Remember also that one study demonstrated that actual arrival and departure schedules remained very much the same(Ronen,1981)