I-deals

Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves

Denise Rousseau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317468288
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Employees with valuable skills and a sense of their own worth can make their jobs, pay, perks, and career opportunities different from those of their coworkers in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Work at home arrangements, flexible hours, special projects - personally negotiated arrangements like these can be a valuable source of flexibility and personal satisfaction, but at the risk of creating inequality and resentment by other employees. This book shows how such individual arrangements can be made fair and acceptable to coworkers, and beneficial to both the employee and the employer. Written by the world's leading expert on the subject, I-deals: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves challenges traditional notions that standardization is the way to create workplace justice. The book is filled with real examples, cases, and supporting data. It expands conventional ideas of workplace fairness, provides details on the power that workers influence over their employment conditions, and spells out how employees and employers can channel this influence into mutually beneficial innovations. The book is "must reading" for students and scholars in the fields of human resource management and organizational behavior, and for managers and employees everywhere.

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What Is an Idiosyncratic Deal?

“Educational leave” for two Corning engineers to spend a year doing underwater photography.¹

Access to corporate planes, apartment, cars, for 20 years. Financial planning with $8,000 limit in reimbursable expenses annually, home security services ...

—From IBM CEO Louis V Gerstner Jr.’s retirement package.²

I-deals are special conditions of employment negotiated between an individual worker and his or her employer.³ An i-deal can alter a single feature of a worker’s relationship with an employer, as in the case of a trusted worker who seeks to work on a special project while enjoying the same compensation, title, hours, and work setting as his or her coworkers. Or, an i-deal can render every aspect of a worker’s employment unique and customized, a circumstance enjoyed by a former chief executive who stays on as an adviser long after formally retiring, with special duties, compensation, perks, and recognition.⁴

I-deals are common in the workplace, yet their precise makeup is often invisible. Like the greater part of an iceberg, many aspects of i-deals lie below the waterline of public awareness. I-deals constitute the more private aspect of a highly personal experience: the customized arrangements, special conditions, or accommodations a worker obtains from an employer. Our focus is the nature of these arrangements, their consequences (positive and negative), and the processes whereby i-deals arise—in particular, the often secret negotiations between one worker and his or her employer.

This chapter sets the stage for this book. It defines i-deals, describes their distinctive features, and illustrates the kinds of i-deals workers negotiate. Finally, it highlights some of the dilemmas i-deals raise that must be addressed for them to benefit all the parties involved.

Defining I-deals

Idiosyncratic deals are voluntary, personalized agreements of a nonstandard nature that individual employees negotiate with their employers regarding terms that benefit them both. These individualized employment arrangements differ in some fashion from those received by others in the organization employed to do similar work. Several distinct features characterize i-deals and differentiate them from more dysfunctional and generally unfair forms of person-specific employment arrangements (e.g., cronyism or favoritism).⁵ Specifically, i-deals are

• individually negotiated by a worker;

• different from the employment conditions experienced by others in that worker’s work group or unit, even among those who have negotiated their own i-deals;

• beneficial to both the worker and the employer; and

• varying in scope from a single feature to the entire employment relationship.

Individually Negotiated Deals

An i-deal arises when a worker negotiates a customized arrangement with an employer. The market power of certain workers, or the value their employer places on them, or both, puts them in a position to demand significantly greater perquisites than their less-advantaged coworkers receive. These conditions also make workers more willing to negotiate rather than merely accept what an employer offers.⁶

A central feature of i-deals is that the employee directly negotiates with the employer regarding some aspect of his or her employment. The concept of an individual worker bargaining with an employer flies in the face of traditional notions of labor relations.⁷ The conventional labor-management relationship, in which the firm sets the price and work conditions and the worker accepts or rejects the offer, is predicated on a view of individual workers as powerless in comparison to the firm. It presumes workers have no money in reserve, must sell their labor immediately or else another will readily take their place, have no market knowledge, and possess no talent for bargaining. Contemporary firms, however, do increasingly depend on worker skills and organization-specific knowledge, which in themselves can provide sustainable competitive advantage.⁸ Under such conditions, individual workers can have considerable bargaining power.

Our focus is on workers who recognize that they have power—knowledge workers and others with scarce and highly valued skills—who can behave in ways often unimaginable to those who see themselves as having less power. The notion of individual workers having power was to a great extent unimaginable at the turn of the twentieth century in industrialized nations, on the heels of twenty years of violently squashed strikes in the dominant industries of the day, such as coal and steel.⁹ The dominant industries of the twenty-first century have a different balance of power. Insofar as their employer gains competitive advantage through its workforce, individual workers are more likely to assert their preferences and be accommodated by employers when they possess valued resources and can control their use. Valued resources include worker skills, knowledge, and relationships (with coworkers, customers, or suppliers) that increase productivity. Employees are positioned to exert control over their efforts when the work they do is not highly standardized or easily monitored. Unlike assembly-line work, for example, knowledge work allows employees to control their own work processes and output. This control extends from shaping the information and analyses used to solve a design problem or write a policy report to the quality of the relationships built with customers and clients.

Mobility makes it possible for a worker to decide when, how, and for whom to be productive. Workers cannot bargain effectively where they can be easily laid off, replaced, or forced into retirement. In contrast, many workers have alternatives to joining or remaining with a particular firm. They may go to work for another employer for whom their skills have value. Some have the opportunity to become productive not only with an employer, but also by going it alone as independent contractors or as entrepreneurs who become employers themselves. In a survey of high-technology employers in Pittsburgh, the vast majority of employers indicated that at least some of their employees were capable of successfully founding their own businesses.¹⁰ This mix of roles and identities creates blurry boundaries between the notions of the individual as a worker, self-manager, and entrepreneur owner or contractor.¹¹ Yet the essence of the traditional trade unionist’s assumption still holds: To bargain advantageously, a worker needs to be in a powerful position, and this means having three things: control over the exercise of his or her labor or use of scarce knowledge, possession of market information relevant to both labor and the employing organization itself, and some skill in negotiating. When these conditions come together, the individual worker who recognizes the power of his or her position can effectively negotiate terms of employment. Nonetheless, not all idiosyncrasies need to be bargained for. As we shall see, in many instances workers have the means to customize certain features of their own jobs without employer approval. It is when they lack the opportunity or authority to do so that negotiation enters the picture.

I-deals can arise at the worker’s initiative, as, for instance, when a banker requests paid leave to attend an international executive program overseas. Alternatively, a worker can negotiate an i-deal after the company initiates a change, as, for instance, in the case of the engineer who bargains for special pay and career opportunities when asked to accept a transfer. In either case, to negotiate an i-deal a worker must believe he or she has the power to do so.

Heterogeneity: Differences Among Coworkers

I-deals grant a worker certain conditions of employment that differ from those of other employees in similar positions or in the same work group. The result is intra-workgroup heterogeneity in some aspects of the rewards and benefits employees receive.¹² This variation is a potential motivator as well as a source of perceived inequity and injustice.

Our focus is on regular employees. We are not talking about the kind of work variation Dan Pink describes in his fascinating book Free Agent Nation.¹³ The workers I have in mind are not the independent contractor cum permalancer, hired gun, guru, lone worker, or 1099er (Form 1099 is the tax form received by self-employed American workers) that Pink describes, though they may desire many of the same things. Rather, we are dealing with the full-time office worker in a corporate headquarters, valued marketing manager in a high-tech company, creative designer in a start-up firm, corporate accountant in a petrochemical plant, veteran steelworker in a small Pennsylvania factory, and tenured college professor or her administrative assistant, among many others, each of whom has bargained successfully for some condition of employment that their coworkers doing the same work do not have. This book brings a different perspective to the study of employment by investigating the conditions under which individual employees enjoy unique flexibility, special training, unusually challenging projects, more resources, and other working conditions that differ from those of their coworkers in the same jobs.

Being able to garner idiosyncratic conditions in one’s employment is a sign of one’s acceptance as a valuable contributor to the organization—someone worthy of special treatment, a situation akin to the phenomenon of idiosyncrasy credits accorded to high-status group members.¹⁴ In circumstances where the distinctive qualities of high-status members create tolerance of their special treatment or unusual behavior on the part of others in the group, the concept of idiosyncrasy credits explains how exceptions come to be acceptable in work groups, as with this example from a Pennsylvania steel mill:

One guy who kind of got special treatment worked on the paint line. He was probably the most senior guy in the mill, although he was only around 40 or 45. This guy did the same thing every day. He hung beams on the paint line, all day long. I did this job before, and consider it physically the most difficult in the mill. But this guy loved it, and he was amazing at it. He was like a machine in his ability to work constantly, or at whatever the pace of the paint line was. Everyone in the mill liked and respected this guy. When he wanted to take a break, we did so, even if the boss was coming around. It was understood that when he was on the job, the work would get done. Management and the workers did what they could to accommodate this guy.¹⁵

I-deals originate from some of the same processes as the idiosyncratic arrangement the steelworker enjoyed: the id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What Is an Idiosyncratic Deal?
• Chapter 2 Everyday Idiosyncrasy and Its Many Forms
• Chapter 3 Shady Deals: What I-deals Are Not
• Chapter 4 Signs of I-deals in Organizational Research
• Chapter 5 I-deal Types: Six-Plus Ways Employees Bargain
• Chapter 6 How Employees Negotiate I-Deals
• Chapter 7 Coworkers: The I-deal’s Most Interested Third Parties
• Chapter 8 Organizational Perspectives on I-deals as a Human Resource Practice
• Chapter 9 Cross-National Factors and Idiosyncratic Deals
• Chapter 10 Learning from I-deals
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author