Case Study: Flexible Work Schedules

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The following is a summary of a case study for the Aflac company on flexible work schedules and perceived fairness. The Aflac company was founded in 1955, and since then has become a Fortune 500 company that offers many insurance options to people throughout the world (Giglio, 2011). Aflac has many employees who can benefit from flexible work schedules, and Aflac now offers varying shifts and alternate schedules to employees. Shifts are offered at the traditional 8am to 5pm, a morning shift from 6:30am to 2:30pm, and evenings from 3pm to 11pm. In addition, alternate schedules are either four 10-hour days with 3 days off each week or three 12-hour days with 4 days off each week. These flexible schedules were launched in response to the need …show more content…
Organizational justice is the overall concern with fair treatment of employees and the perception of fairness by the employee, and has become a dominant theory of motivation in organizations and the workplace (Cojuharenco & Patient, 2013). The three primary components of organizational justice are distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Cojuharenco and Patient (2013) describe distributive justice as the perception of fairness as it relates to work outcomes; procedural justice as the perceived fairness of the procedures used to achieve work outcomes; and interactional justice as the perceived fairness of the explanations and interpersonal treatment of employees. Since interactional justice is comprised of two different areas, it is often broken down into the two subcategories of informational justice and interpersonal justice, with informational relating to the explanations and interpersonal relating to interpersonal employee treatment. Aflac has worked to ensure all three components of organizational justice, which has had the result of the program being well received and perceived as fair by …show more content…
Both distributive and procedural justice are referred to by Greenberg (as cited in Cojuharenco & Patient, 2013) as structural, while interactional justice is considered social. Therefore, these two aspects of organizational justice may be seen as complimentary, with distributive pertaining to the way rewards or benefits are spread out and procedural as the actual manner in which those rewards or benefits are determined. Latham (2012) points out that distributive justice focuses on what was distributed and to whom, while procedural justice focuses on the system or process of that distribution. The “what” for Aflac is flexible work arrangements and the “whom” is employees that work for the organization; whereas the process for distribution is throughout the company and in such a way as to provide many of the opportunities mentioned earlier as contributing to decisions being more readily accepted. Aflac has made the flexible work arrangements available to all employees who desire it, and therefore satisfy the distributive justice portion. Aflac also seems to have provided the criteria used to make such a decision with employees, as well as providing voice (e.g. feedback, focus group sessions), and the perception of those criterion and input are seen as fair by employees; which satisfies the procedural justice

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