Breaking the Persistence of Extra-Long Working Hours in Elite Management Consulting Firms: Learning from the Danish Case
Final Report Abstract
The results of our project enabled us to make three core contributions to the academic debate on extreme work hours and temporality. Our first broader core contribution is to theorize the often hidden and invisible dynamics of temporality as a previously underappreciated barrier to changing regimes of extreme work hours. In contrast to cultural and power-related barriers, temporality constitutes a novel explanation of the puzzling persistence of extreme work hours. Moreover, by integrating positive feedback and path dependence into research on organizational temporality, our project significantly advances our understanding of the long-term dynamics of temporal structuring and the emergence of temporal lock-ins. We think that our theorizing will help to see issues such as extreme work hours, business, and well-being in new and more complex ways. We think that by building on these novel insights, organizational research and practice can come one step closer to a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics through which organizational temporality emerges, changes, and persists. The second broader core contribution of our project is to introduce industry-level dynamics as a so far neglected, but crucial level of analysis into research on extreme work hours. By empirically studying industry dynamics in the group of German elite consulting firms over more than 50 years, we could demonstrate how, over time, this strategic group develop a shared group identity more or less homogenously defined through temporality, in particular through working faster and longer than others. This conviction proved persistent (path dependent). This finding further deepens our understanding of temporal barriers to change by elucidating how competitive dynamics can generate and continuously maintain industry-level lock-ins. A core implication of this finding was that overcoming extreme work-hours very much depends on industrylevel and not only on organizational-level change. The third broader core contribution of our project is to outline a novel approach to changing persistent regimes of extreme work hours that overcome the temporal, cultural, and power-related barriers to change in professional service firms. At its core, this approach entails a set of interrelated time management practices that enable consultants to monitor and steer collective time use as well as to work more predictable, more flexible, and shorter hours. These findings contribute to research on work-life balance and integration as they point to the potential of new collective forms of time management to address some of the most pressing issues in contemporary workplaces.
Publications
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(2019) Why Do Extreme Work Hours Persist? Temporal Uncoupling as a New Way of Seeing. AMJ (Academy of Management Journal) 62 (6) 1818–1847
Blagoev, Blagoy; Schreyögg, Georg
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(2018). Organizational working time regimes: Drivers, consequences and attempts to change patterns of excessive work hours. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 32(3+4): 155–167
Blagoev, B., Muhr, S. L., Ortlieb, R. & Schreyögg G.
