Telecommuting

Modelling the Employer's and the Employee's Decision-Making Process

Adriana Bernardino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138289659
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351971966
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Telecommuting has been regarded as a powerful tool to reduce traffic congestion, pollution and energy consumption. It also supposed to improve lifestyle quality and job satisfaction by providing employees with flexible schedules with which to address their work load and personal requirements whilst also enhancing recruitment capability and productivity and significantly reducing costs. Nevertheless, a strong resistance to the adoption of telecommuting still persists.

In this book, first published in 1996, state of the art demand modelling techniques are used to delve into critical issues raised by the question of telecommuting. The benefits and costs of telecommuting are investigated in an effort to provide concrete evidence to inform the private sector's adoption decision process and the public sector's policy design. This title will be of interest to students of business studies and human resource management.

V

Model System Estimation Results

In this chapter, the model system that represents the process of adoption of telecommuting is specified and estimated.

MODEL SYSTEM SPECIFICATION

The formulation of the model system that represents the adoption process is presented in this section. The models for the employer's and the employee's decision processes are presented separately.

The Employer’s Model

The modeling framework for the employer’s decision process is presented in Figure 5.1. This framework consists of two parts: the design of the telecommuting program and the decision to offer the designed program to the employees.

● PROGRAM DESIGN

In this first stage, the employer selects, from all possible telecommuting programs, the ones that can address her/his motivations, while satisfying existing constraints. In the framework discussed in Chapter 3 it is assumed that the employer's objective is to maximize profit. In that same chapter, telecommuting is defined as a combination of attributes, each of which can assume various levels.

Figure 5.1 - The Employer’s Decision Process -Modelling Framework

Given these assumptions, when designing a telecommuting program, the employer is searching for the combination of attribute values A_i that maximizes:

where A is the set of all possible combinations of the values of the attributes of a telecommuting program, A_j is the vector of attribute values that characterize program j, P is the price of the organization’s product, and π, f, and c are, respectively, the profit, the production and the cost functions of the organization.

To model the employer’s choice of a program design, a probabilistic approach is adopted to account for the randomness due to lack of information about the organization’s production function and cost structure, as well as for other unobserved factors. The following model is specified:

Structural Model:

Measurement Model:

where:

vector of attribute values of telecommuting program i.

vector of interactions between telecommuting attributes and organization characteristics.

vector of structural parameters.

vector of structural parameters.

vector of random disturbance, distributed iid Gumbel (0,1).

set of all the telecommuting programs available to the employer.

vector of dummy variables indicating the chosen telecommuting program.

The subscript relating to the individual respondent is omitted for simplicity. Given this specification, the likelihood of observing the vector of choices d_A, for a particular employer, given the set of all possible arrangements A and the organization characteristics O, can be written as:

where

is the set of structural parameters

The estimation of these unknown parameter is performed by maximizing the logarithm of this likelihood function over the whole sample. In practice, the outcome of the employer’s choice could be one or more telecommuting arrangements. For simplicity of the data collection process, it is assumed in this research that only one program is designed.

● PROGRAM OFFERING D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I Introduction
• II The State-of-the-Art
• III Analytical Framework
• IV A Survey of Telecommuting Preferences
• V Model System Estimation Results
• VI Analysis of the Results
• VII Conclusion
• A The Employer’s Survey
• B The Employee’s Survey
• References
• Index