Employee self-rostering for work-family balance: Leading examples in Austria

Examines two leading cases of Austrian organisations providing employee self-rostering for work-family balance, a little-reported area of employment relations innovation. These cases highlight that such schemes can be successful for managements and employees even in highly routine, mechanised production environments. Asks what sorts of factors encourage management to adopt such schemes and whether different factors encourage their retention over time. In both cases, external environmental factors, internal environmental adaptation and management's embrace of high commitment strategies all influenced managerial decision making. However, these three sets of factors operated in different degrees and in different sequences between the two cases. In neither case was the institutional environment of any real importance.