Managerial perceptions of workplace flexibility and firm performance

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explain the impact of workplace flexibility on managers' perceptions of firm performance. The research focuses primarily on outsourcing, an increasingly common way of creating workplace flexibility, by studying its antecedents based on several economic and organisational theories.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is a postal survey to a sample of 156 Spanish firms and statistical analysis.Findings – The findings suggest that it is important to take into account different theoretical perspectives to explain the intensity of outsourcing: all proposed antecedents of the intensity of outsourcing except differentiation strategy and cooperation are significantly associated to outsourcing. There is not any significant relationship between outsourcing and firm performance; workplace internal flexibility does impact on firm performance but external flexibility does not. However, the results change according to the category of core and peripheral outsourcing.Rese...

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