On the Harvard Business Review podcast, Sarah Green interviews Erin Reid, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, about the image of the “ideal worker” and why it’s different for men than women. In either case, expectations in work cultures such as she describes are too high.
The women were expected to not work all the time, and people were policing their time. And they were offered all these accommodations. And so they took them. And I think it is a terrible way of working, to be expected to work all the time. So when they’re offered the opportunity to stay in a professional job and work less, they take it, which is reasonable.
But these opportunities were not offered to men. And the men who tried to avail themselves of formal accommodations, or the men who told the company they didn’t want to travel that much, these men were really harshly penalized. So they were sort of put in this space where it was really stigmatized to say that they weren’t willing to work all the time.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.
Read also Reid’s longer article here, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks.”
More importantly, however, passing [pulling back on work hours surreptitiously while still appearing to work up 60 to 80 hours per week] is not a good strategy for the organization as a whole: not only does it involve an element of deception between colleagues, bosses, and subordinates, it also perpetuates the myth that those who are successful are also all wholly devoted to work. Yet, a critical implication of this research is that working long hours is not necessary for high quality work. The experiences of those men who passed show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.
