Opportunity to use NWW: Do Sectors matter?

What is it about?

The diffusion of New Ways of Working (NWW) is an important trend in contemporary organi-zations. Many related empirical studies have been produced, but none have focused on differences in employees’ perceptions of the opportunity to use NWW according to organization sector (pri-vate, semi-public, public). This study, based on neo institutionalism and HR attributions theory, investigated these differences via a survey (n=2693) of employees at private (n=358), semi-public (n=204), and public (n=2131) organizations. Based on the use of the PLS-SEM method, as well as ANOVA tests and pairwise comparisons of marginal linear predictions we uncover differences in perceptions between employees in different sectors regarding the possibility of using NWW. Indeed, the results show that public employees reported less opportunity to use NWW than their private and semi-public counterparts. Furthermore, private sector employees were more likely to attribute well-being and productivity benefits to NWW than their public sector and semi-public counterparts. We also show that institutional and organizational variables specific to the charac-teristics of organizations in the three

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Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

Why is it important?

New Ways of Working (NWW), their implementation, and their development depends largely on institutional, and organizational characteristics. This paper precisely seeks to investigate whether institutional and organizational differences between private, semi-public, and public organizations might explain differences in terms of perceived opportunity to use NWW by employees working in these three specific sectors. Results show that insitutional and organizational characteristics do matter when it comes to explain perceptions with respect to opportunity to use NWW.

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