What's in a norm? Deviation from the Ideal Worker Norm as an explanation for backlash against leave‐takers

Abstract

AbstractPrior research has suggested that employees who take leave from work experience backlash – with some authors describing backlash to deviations from gendered norms and others to deviations from an ‘Ideal Worker Norm’ (IWN). In this study, we investigate the degree to which backlash against leave‐takers is explained by these two separate, but related, paths, and whether individual (gender of leave‐taker) or organizational (family‐friendly vs. competitive culture) moderators mitigate such effects. Using a pre‐registered experimental design, and our newly validated Ideal Worker Evaluation measure and evaluations of agency and communion to capture perceived deviation from the norms, we find significant indirect effects of leave‐taking on backlash via the IWN path and the agency portion of the gendered path, but not via the communion portion of the gendered path. We also find that family‐friendly organizational cultures partially mitigate the effect of leave‐taking on backlash, but predominately via the IWN path and not the gendered norms path. Whereas gender of the leave‐taker was found to affect backlash via the gendered norms path (and not the IWN path), but only for the agency using the proscribed operationalization of ‘dominance’. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are then discussed.