Tackling the Autonomy Paradox: A Team Perspective on the Individual Use of Time-Spatial Flexibility

Abstract

In many organizations, the question is no longer whether employees should have the oppor-tunity for time-spatial flexibility, but rather how to successfully organize it. At the individual level, time-spatial flexibility has been appreciated as an autonomy-enhancing factor (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; McNall et al., 2010). However, the “autonomy paradox” (Mazmanian et al., 2013) illustrates that constant availability concurrently reduces personal autonomy. Even though knowledge professionals have gained more autonomy to choose when and where to work, prevailing team norms may make them feel obligated to be available, thereby limiting their ability to disconnect from work, with detrimental effects on their recov-ery (Schlachter et al., 2018). At the team level, however, the great variety of strategies for using time-spatial flexibility poses a challenge for team coordination and the predictability of availability. In addition, as team members compare themselves to one another, perceptions of justice regarding availability practices may differ. Therefore, we argue that flexible teams need to purposefully shape their availability norms and suggest a guided team reflexivity pro-cess. This approach enables team members to establish shared mental models of the use of time-spatial flexibility, which define the cornerstones of individual time-spatial flexibility strategies. At the core of the process is the joint development of team-based interaction scripts of availability uncovering expectations regarding the use of time-spatial flexibility, thus re-ducing the uncertainty of availability, and allowing for recovery outside of work.