I-deals

Book excerpt: 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.