WORK LIFE BALANCE,MANAGEMENT PRACTICESAND PRODUCTIVITY

Do “Anglo-Saxon” management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousywork-life balance (WLB) for workers? Many critics of “neo-libéralisme sauvage” have argued thatincreased competition from globalisation is damaging employees’ quality of life. Others have arguedthe opposite that improving work-life balance is actually a competitive tool that companies can useto raise productivity. We try to shed some empirical light on these issues using an innovative surveytool to collect new data on management and work-life balance practices from 732 medium sizedmanufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. First, we show that our measure ofwork-life balance is a useful summary of a range of policies in the firm – family-friendly policies,flexible working, shorter hours, more holidays, subsidised childcare, etc. We show that this worklifebalance measure is significantly associated with better management.[...]