Ariane Ollier-Malaterre

University of Quebec in Montreal | UQAM · Department of Organization and Human Resources

As employees increasingly interact with their professional contacts in online social networks that are personal in nature, such as Facebook or Twitter, they are likely to experience a collision of their professional and personal identities unique to this new and expanding social space. In particular, online social networks present employees with bo...

[Sarah Bourdeau and Ariane Ollier-Malaterre contributed equally to this article and share first authorship.] Many employees hesitate to use work-life policies (e.g., flexible work arrangements, leaves, on-site services) for fear of career consequences. However, findings on the actual career consequences of such use are mixed. We de-bundle work-life...

In this essay, we develop a framework for understanding the evolving relationships between technology, work, and family. We focus primarily on the temporal, spatial, and relational boundaries between work and family and the ways in which technology is changing boundary management practices. We suggest that the ubiquity and power of communications t...

Although cross-national work–family research has made great strides in recent decades, knowledge accumulation on the impact of culture on the work–family interface has been hampered by a limited geographical and cultural scope that has excluded countries where cultural expectations regarding work, family, and support may differ. We advance this lit...

Digital surveillance is a daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China. This book explores how Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it. It investigates their imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system. Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary...

This article conceptualizes the bright and dark sides of self‐verification processes among dyads of coworkers from different social groups. We argue that these processes depend on coworkers' social dominance orientation (SDO), which determines whether they hold dominant, subordinate, or egalitarian social identities. The proposed typology identifie...

Plain Language Summary For decades, the leadership literature has emphasized the importance of leader–subordinate relationships, providing abundant evidence that high-quality relationships between leaders and subordinates lead to a host of positive outcomes. Yet, significant confusion persists about the configurations of high-quality leader-subordi...

Purpose Enterprise social networks (ESN) that enable faster communications and knowledge sharing at work are an integral part of many workplaces. Although the affordances potency and actualization constructs identify work context as important, few studies to date have teased out how the interactions between ESN’s affordances, users’ goals and the w...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has thrust millions of workers into high‐intensity telecommuting. While much research has examined the first months of the pandemic, little is known about how workers have responded to this new work arrangement over time. The stressor‐reaction perspective suggests that any strain related to the physical separation from coworke...

Although work is increasingly globalized and mediated by technology, little research has accumulated on the role of culture in shaping individuals' preferences regarding the segmentation or integration of their work and family roles. This study examines the relationships between gender egalitarianism (the extent a culture has a fluid understanding...

Although employees increasingly need support to reconcile work and family, many lack a thorough knowledge of work-life practices such as flexible work arrangements, leaves, and dependent care programs, or they hesitate to use them. Building on social network and social contagion research, this paper argues that employees assess work-life practices...

Chapter 3 analyses the ‘moral quality’ narrative as a source of support for digital surveillance. While the interview questions were focused on cameras at street crossings, social media, blacklists, and privacy, participants kept bringing up the themes of rules and punishment. Many of them lamented the lack of ‘moral quality’ of their fellow citize...

Chapter 2 situates current surveillance in China in its historical context, and explains the state’s philosophy of ‘social governance’ and how surveillance operates through bottom-up grid management and top-down database centralisation. It then analyses how different ‘social credit’ systems score citizens based on their financial, social, and perso...

Viewing digital surveillance as a useful principle does not mean that participants lived well with it. Chapter 8 identifies four main self-protective mental tactics that participants used to dissociate themselves from personal exposure to surveillance: (1) brushing surveillance aside with the rationale ‘there is no risk associated with surveillance...

Chapter 7 discusses the second important redeeming narrative that emerged from the research interviews, that of technology as a magic bullet and saviour. Participants expected digital technology to improve people’s ‘moral quality’ by forcing them to follow the rules, to offset past humiliations by modernising the country, and to cure China by uproo...

Chapter 1 introduces readers to scholarship on privacy and surveillance. It discusses conceptions of privacy in China and the West and provides a succinct review of scholarship on reciprocal, commercial, and state surveillance. It follows by discussing the implications of surveillance and how citizens in China and the West perceive privacy and surv...

The conclusion highlights the contributions of this book to the understanding of digital surveillance in contemporary China. First, this book identifies the tension between participants’ narratives on surveillance as indispensable and the mental and emotional burden that living with surveillance entails. Second, this book qualifies the narratives u...

Chapter 4 explores the multifaceted narratives regarding China and the West. On the one hand, participants evoked the century of humiliations and continued fears of being attacked. On the other hand, they expressed pride in China’s achievements and hopes in a promised trajectory to restore the country. They longed for the recognition of China as a...

Chapter 10 discusses self-censorship, orthodoxy, and the challenges of interviewing in a country where many topics are considered political, such that the researcher and the participant sometimes ‘dance’ around political speak and propaganda.

In addition to engaging in these tactics, almost half of the participants expressed misgivings and objections to surveillance. Chapter 9 analyses their apprehension, their behaviours to limit exposure, and the principled objections voiced by a small fraction of participants. It then analyses two tensions in these reactions. First, participants most...

Chapter 5 delves into the moral roots of perceptions of privacy. The participants primarily understood privacy as the concealment of shameful information to save face and maintain respectability (yīnsī) rather than as personal thoughts or information you do not wish to disclose in public (yǐnsī). This morally tainted view of privacy made wanting pr...

Chapter 6 analyses the first of two redeeming narratives that respond to the shame-inducing narratives identified in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Specifically, it unpacks different rationales underlying the participants’ support for the government. The first states that China is unique because of its history, culture, and size and that the one-party syste...

From its headquarters in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), La Vie en Rose sells lingerie, swimwear and sleepwear in over 275 boutiques in 18 countries. The company has followed a growth strategy since its acquisition by François Roberge in 1996. This case study describes the international Human Resources Management (HRM) challenges raised by its expansion...

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated two trends that are now fully part of the “new normal” of work. First, the erosion of boundaries between work and life has become very salient with the normalization of work from home. Second, the quantification of organizational control, which was already present in monitoring devices and algorith...

In many parts of the world, citizens leave data traces when they conduct internet searches, post on social media, send messages, make electronic payments, or go by facial recognition cameras. In China, the scale of the data being collected, in a sociotechnical environment where the use of cash is fast disappearing and social media platforms such as...

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_right_to_disconnect This is a thinkpiece by members of the International Network on Technology, Work, and Family (INTWAF) at the School of Management at the University of Quebec in Montreal: https://intwaf.esg.uqam.ca/en/home/ Abstract. Constant connectivity harms employees’ work-life balance and mental health. B...

The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated a massive adoption of high-intensity work-from-home (WFH), a form of work organization that is expected to persist. Yet, little is known about the predictors and mechanisms underlying employees’ successful adjustment to high-intensity WFH. Drawing on signaling theory, we identify psychological climate for face...

This article problematises the assumptions regarding work, family and employment that underlie the World Health Organization (WHO)’s COVID-19 guidelines. The scientific evidence grounding sanitary and social distancing recommendations is embedded in conceptualisations of work as skilled jobs in the formal economy and of family as urban and nuclear....

This study attempts to delineate $2 when they use social media, shop online, and make electronic payments using WeChat Pay and Alipay. It is part of a book I am writing on perceptions of privacy and surveillance in China and is grounded in an inductive content analysis of 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted late 2019 in Beijing, Shan...

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2021/remote-work-can-be-lot-better-this

Techno-stressors stemming from the use of information technology (IT) have become a major source of stress in the modern workplace. While research shows that techno-stressors negatively affect employees’ work attitudes and performance, little is known about their effects on employees’ non-work lives. This research investigates the impact of techno-...

Individuals are increasingly connected with their coworkers on personal and professional social network sites (SNS) (e.g., Facebook), with consequences for workplace relationships. Drawing on SNS research and on social identity and boundary management theory, we surveyed 202 employees and found that coworkers’ friendship acts (e.g., liking, comment...

Despite the importance of India on the global scene, its unique culture, and the growing concerns about work-family balance in this country, existing work-family research in India is scarce. Moreover, it is predominantly quantitative and conducted using scales developed in Western developed countries, which limits our understanding of the work-fami...

The present study draws on the work‐family and cross‐national management literature to examine the relationships between Family Supportive Organizational Perceptions (FSOP), work‐family enrichment, and job burnout across five countries with different cultural backgrounds: Malaysia, New Zealand, France, Italy, and Spain. Using a combined sample of 9...

https://hbr.org/2019/06/if-you-want-to-use-your-phone-less-first-figure-out-why

Reduced-load (RL) work, a flexible customized form of part-time work in which a full-time job is redesigned to reduce the hours and the workload while taking a pay cut, can enable sustainable careers. Yet previous research suggests mixed results, with RL work facing implementation hurdles such as insufficient workload reduction, and stalled careers...

Open access, paper in French: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/lsp/2018-n81-lsp04317/1056307ar/ Certains réseaux sociaux numériques, comme Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ou Google+ par exemple, offrent la possibilité de se connecter à des contacts aussi bien professionnels que personnels, et de partager des informations (messages, photos, vidéos, et...

Most of the interruptions caused by smartphones and other communication technologies are initiated by the individuals themselves. Likewise, breakouts from connectivity are enacted by individuals who want to disconnect. This paper explores human agency in the face of material agency, and specifically the decisions that people make to regulate their...

Drawing on the perceived work–family fit and balance perspective, this study investigates demands and resources as antecedents of work–life balance (WLB) across four countries (New Zealand, France, Italy and Spain), so as to provide empirical cross-national evidence. Using structural equation modelling analysis on a sample of 870 full time employee...

This paper develops a theoretical model that highlights the mechanisms underlying the contagion of long working hours from supervisors to subordinates at different stages of their relationship. Drawing upon social learning theory, we suggest that subordinates mimic the supervisor’s working hours through vicarious learning. Focusing first on the rol...

Given the increasing use of technology and the growing blurring of the boundaries between the work and nonwork domains, decisions about when to interrupt work for family and vice versa can have critical implications for relationship satisfaction within dual-earner couples. Using a sample of 104 dual-earner couples wherein one of the partners is a m...

Although we use our smartphone for many important daily activities, overreliance on them can have some unintended and unfortunate consequences. Unlike the devices used by prior generations, smartphones are more than mere inanimate objects, and instead have become personally involved “subjects.” All of us—including individuals, organizations, famili...

This article examines the impact of national context, i.e., cultural beliefs shared in a country and structural factors such as public policies, on individuals’ family care decisions, such as the number of children in the family or the time spent with them. I argue that although family care decisions are intimate, they are not private, because they...

Although an increasing number of individuals are connected with their coworkers on social network sites (SNS) that are professional and personal (e.g., Facebook), little research has explored the outcomes of these connections on interpersonal relationships at work. Drawing on SNS research as well as on an existing typology of online boundary manage...

One of the most prominent cultural frameworks in management and psychology research has been proposed by the transnational team working on the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project, which conceptualized and measured nine cultural dimensions across 62 countries: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, institution...

Certains réseaux sociaux numériques, comme Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ou Google+ par exemple, offrent la possibilité de se connecter à des contacts aussi bien professionnels que personnels, et de partager des informations (messages, photos, vidéos, etc.) relevant des deux domaines. Les cercles sociaux d’un individu, qui sont largement segmentés d...

This article investigates the relationship between the skill profile of the employees (i.e. the percentage of employees in highly skilled jobs) and the provision of flexible working hours in the workplace (i.e. the proportion of employees entitled to adapt, within certain limits, the time when they begin or finish their daily work according to thei...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the use and misuse of swearing in the workplace. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative methodology, the authors interviewed 52 lawyers, medical doctors and business executives in the UK, France and the USA. Findings In contrast to much of the incivility and social norms literatures, the au...

While cross-national work-life research is a flourishing field of research, but a recent one, it is relatively recent as national context had been the missing ‘elephant in the room’ of work–life research for decades. Based on the keynote talk I gave at the 2015 Community, Work and Family conference in Malmö, Sweden, this research note highlights th...

The management of work–life boundaries is portrayed in the literature as being a matter of individual choice. Accordingly, organizational influence has been underestimated. The first objective of this article is therefore to determine whether an organizational culture of integration (e.g. expectations about taking work home) can influence individua...

Increasing attention is being paid to the impacts of country-level contexts on the work-life interface. However, lack of theoretical clarity as well as operationalization challenges are significant roadblocks for comparative work-life research. This article provides guidance for cross-national work-life research by conducting a systematic interdisc...

employees or to organisational cultures that can prevent employees from accessing employer-driven work–life policies (WLP). Our study focuses on factors originating in the jobs themselves. We conducted 98 in-depth employee interviews in two multinational companies based in Europe and led feedback sessions with human resources executives. Three mech...

This study examines line managers’ rationales regarding reduced-load work (RLW), an emerging talent management practice allowing professionals to reduce their workload and take a pay cut, while actively remaining on a career path. Unlike flextime and telework, RLW addresses professionals’ core problems of rising work hours and workloads. Interviews...

Work-life research has paid increasing attention to the national contexts within which individual experiences of the work-life interface and of employer-driven HR practices are embedded. However, cross-national work-life research is hampered by the complexity of identifying and operationalizing country-level variables, as well as by the interdiscip...

In this study we aim to explore the use and misuse of language at the work, focusing on the practice of swearing. Using qualitative research method, we interviewed 30 professionals and executives in the UK and France. Our findings indicated, in contrast to conventional thinking, that swearing can lead to positive outcomes and can be useful within c...

Drawing on new institutionalism theory, this study examines the influence of institutional logics, the belief systems that direct decision-makers’ attention to particular sets of issues, on human resource (HR) adaptation to demographic changes. We argue that the prevalence of age-neutral HR management and of age-related HR practices such as age ass...

Greater attention is needed in the management and work–life fields to how variation in cross-national contexts and assumptions operating at the individual, organizational and national levels influence work–life policies, practices, processes, and outcomes for individuals, families, businesses, and society. This article presents a review of cross-na...

Greater attention is needed in the management and work–life fields to how variation in cross-national contexts and assumptions operating at the individual, organizational and national levels influence work–life policies, practices, processes, and outcomes for individuals, families, businesses, and society. This article presents a review of cross-na...

Le paradigme de l'enrichissement entre vie professionnelle et vie personnelle, qui désigne le transfert de ressources et d'affects d'un rôle à un autre, a longtemps été éclipsé par celui du conflit. Plusieurs processus d'enrichissement d'une sphère de vie à l'autre ont été identifiés, par exemple instrumental et affectif. L'implication dans le rôle...

A growing area of societal concern across the globe pertains to familyresponsive employment policies and practices that are designed to improve individuals’ ability to effectively carry out work and family demands over the career span (Kamerman, 2005a). Work-family policies and practices are adopted by employers and governments to help employees jo...

This study examined predictors of employee perceptions of organizational work–life support. Using organizational support theory and conservation of resources theory, we reasoned that workplace demands and resources shape employees' perceptions of work–life support through two mechanisms: signaling that the organization cares about their work–life b...

Do organizational work-life initiatives foster commitment? US and UK employers provide formal work-life programs as well as informal flexibility to support employees in their non-work lives. Although it is claimed that work-life initiatives foster employee commitment, the business case still needs to be established. Based on a case study of a pharm...

From conciliation to resilience: 40 years of lexical evolution in the United States While “conciliation” is only just starting to be taken into account by French companies, American employers have been developing those practices for over forty years. The words chosen by the human resources managers and researchers to designate them, from “workfamil...

Despite much research, it remains unclear whether and how organizational work—life and resilience initiatives (WLRI) enhance employee commitment. To open this black box, this theory-building research analyses 73 in-depth interviews in a multinational pharmaceutical company. WLRI foster desirable outcomes for almost two-thirds of the sample (loyalty...

Ce chapitre s'intéresse aux pratiques Work-Life, ou pratiques d'harmonisation travail - hors-travail, mises en œuvre par les employeurs américains. Développées dans les années 1980, ces pratiques englobent la flexibilité temporelle et spatiale du travail et la mise à disposition des salariés d'un ensemble de ressources dans le domaine de la santé,...

Résumé La « famine du temps » est une question couramment débattue aux États-Unis, et nombreux sont les employeurs qui proposent des pratiques dites de work-life ou de flexible working . Cet article situe ces pratiques dans le contexte américain contemporain et explique de quelle façon les entreprises tentent de gérer les conflits de temps : elles...

Why are organizational work-life initiatives endorsed in some countries such as the US or the UK, while they generate little interest in France and other non-Anglo-Saxon environments? In a qualitative theory-building approach, this paper assesses the gap in workplace practices adoption among the US, the UK, and France and analyzes in-depth intervie...

In this paper, we examine the preferences and perceptions of young adult employees, employees at midlife, and older employees in the U.S. about the quality of their employment experiences. Other papers in this series summarize similar analyses of data from countries around the world.

This article discusses work-life balancing perquisites as they effect the economic positions of employers. The cost of implementing options such as flexible hours, job-sharing, and employee health and wellness programs is considered in terms of the affect that they have on productivity. The effect of these types of programs on the experience of emp...

Une comparaison des pratiques des entreprises en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis met à jour la rareté des initiatives des employeurs français eu égard à la vie hors travail de leurs salariés. Au-delà d’une première explication liée au rôle de l’État providence, la comparaison permet d''esquisser deux modèles distincts de gestion du hors-tra...

Most or all of the research on the adoption of Work-Life practices has been conducted with a single-country design. Yet, national contexts do shape the way employers can adopt and want to adopt HR practices. This article explores the critical factors that explain why Work-Life practices are endorsed in some countries, such as the US or the UK, whil...

Un salarié ne se défait pas, au travail, de ce qu'il vit en dehors du travail. C'est pourquoi les employeurs américains et britanniques mettent en œuvre des pratiques d'harmonisation travail – hors-travail, telles que la flexibilité du travail (télétravail, partages de poste, etc.) et le soutien à la vie hors-travail (santé, petite enfance, vie quo...