J53 - Labor-Management Relations; Industrial JurisprudenceReturn

Work flexibility as an element of work flexicurity has had an impact on employment at the national level. In this study, work flexibility is expressed through flexible work arrangements. Organisations may implement various flexible work arrangements, depending on their size or specifically promoted policies in this sense. Thus, organisations indirectly contribute to higher employment at the national level. The aim of the study is to evaluate flexible work arrangements from the perspective of organizations in order to determine to what extent they are available for implementation. To test and validate the results, we develop a questionnaire that includes ten flexible work arrangements. Each flexible work arrangement is rated on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. The survey comprises 350 companies of different sizes from various sectors, located in urban and rural areas. In order to process, analyse and interpret the results, several statistical methods are used: principal component analysis, the ANOVA procedure and the post-hoc test. The findings show that some flexible work arrangements are better rated than others. Differences are also identified in the evaluation of flexible work arrangements by organization size. Our results provide evidence that some organizations show reluctance towards certain flexible work arrangements. Moreover, flexible work arrangements with higher scores are more likely to be implemented by organizations, which may lead to higher employment at the national level.
Implications for Central European audience: Work flexibility is an important and promising element in the context of changing work paradigms. In this context, organizations need to adapt their HR strategies and policies by taking into account work flexibility trends. It will enable them to attract the required workforce both quantitatively and qualitatively. Likewise, organizations implementing different flexible work arrangements could contribute indirectly to increasing employment at the national level.

Criticism as a result of an evaluation process is a common topic of everyday communication within the working environment. The research starts from the assumption that criticism significantly affects the self-perception of employees and it evokes negative emotions that in the end influence job satisfaction and motivation to perform work tasks. The paper presents the frame of a new concept of impact that the criticism has on employee motivation and the first results of the study prove that concept in particular. The main aim was to define whether criticism expressed inappropriately evokes more negative emotions. Hypotheses that focus on its correlation with gender, age, level of education and work status are discussed in the continuation of the paper. The research was conducted on 520 participants in Croatia. The results show a significant impact of the quality of communication on the perception of criticism and its significance in correlation with gender, while hypotheses that correlated evoking negative emotions when expressing criticism within the working environment with age, level of education and work status were rejected. The hypothesis about the correlation between expressing criticism inappropriately and the occurrence of demotivation was rejected.
Implications for Central European audience: The working environment is recently focusing on the digital transformation of all processes and so communication as well. By this transformation, people become alienated and lose basic communication skills. This paper brings together the presentation of long-established communication starting points and the most modern thinking and research on the impact of communication on the motivation, satisfaction and productivity of employees. Based on this, but also with the presented results of the conducted research, it proposes a new communication concept of communicating negative messages that are an integral part of everyday business communication in the organization.