Flexible working arrangements in context: An empirical investigation through self-organizing maps

This is one of the first studies to utilize Kohonen's self-organizing maps on flexible work arrangements (FWAs), employee turnover and absenteeism within different national contexts and an array of organizational factors. While the majority of FWAs did not reduce significantly employee turnover or absenteeism, country and industry were significant contextual variables in FWA use: we deciphered six main country regions, where service and manufacturing organizations were important to FWA preferences. We found a curvilinear relationship between turnover and shift-work among manufacturing firms regardless of country: turnover decreases at low levels and increases at high levels of shift-work. We also found strong positive relationships between weekend work and turnover among manufacturing firms regardless of country and firms in the region comprising of Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic and Belgium. Finally, we found consistently high concentration of organizations with low absenteeism throughout certain industries and countries: noteworthy are service organizations in the Netherlands and manufacturing organizations in Australia. The results demonstrate the contextuality of FWA use across countries and industries, and the usefulness of SOMs for research within human resource management. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.