Flexible Schedules and Other Negotiated Arrangements May Affect Teams’ Success — For Better or Worse

Hoboken, N.J., October 2, 2025 — Employees often work out special arrangements with their bosses that are tailored to their individual needs or circumstances. For example, in recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in requests for greater schedule flexibility. For those able to work remotely it could be a hybrid schedule or a fully remote one, while for others it could be flexible hours that allow them to arrive to work later or leave earlier to drop off or pick up their kids from daycare.

Flexibility isn’t the only thing employees negotiate. Some also negotiate career advancement options such as, for example, having the company pay for classes that will provide the employee with beneficial skills that may lead to a better job in the future. Others may ask to be assigned more interesting or challenging tasks to better use certain competencies. Researchers call these arrangements “idiosyncratic deals” or i-deals, because they aren’t included in the companies’ standard policies and are worked out between employees and their managers.

“An i-deal is a non-standardized, personalized work arrangement that is open for negotiation to employees, but is not available by default to all employees,” explains Assistant Professor Haoying (Howie) Xu who studies organizational behavior and human resource management at Stevens School of Business. “Sometimes it can be written on the job offer and sometimes it’s agreed upon with one’s manager.”

While these arrangements certainly confer advantages to the employees who ask for them, less is known about how they affect their teams’ overall performance and ultimately the level of customer service the teams provide. “This is an important question that needs to be addressed to enable team managers to make more informed decisions about the use of i-deals,” says Xu. Motivated by this, Xu and his collaborators, including Sandy Wayne from the University of Illinois Chicago, Eric Michel from Northern Illinois University, and Jingzhou Pan from Tianjin University, wanted to find out how each of the three i-deal types — flexibility, career and task — play out in the teams’ performance and customer service.

For their research, Xu and his team conducted a study of an American delicatessen chain and three companies in China, including two retailers and an HR consulting — to investigate varied cultural and business settings. The American deli chain offered flexible hours to the assistant managers and was open to negotiations for career and task options. The Chinese companies offered similar arrangements to their employees. Xu’s team conducted surveys of several hundred people in total and analyzed the results.

They found that flexibility i-deals to some employees heightened relationship conflicts within the teams. That’s because when employees compare their own work arrangements to the special arrangements some of their colleagues secured, they may feel that the latter negotiated a better deal. “Consciously or subconsciously, people tend to compare themselves to others, including their coworkers,” Xu says. If someone, for example, is allowed to leave early, their colleagues may perceive that as unfair. They may see themselves as having to pick up the slack.

The increased relationship conflicts led to diminished customer service, Xu’s research found. “It undermined team coherence by heightening the team conflict.” Xu says. “And in turn, the downstream consequence is that the customer service is also undermined. If you’re stressed or unhappy because of tensions within your team, that emotional dynamic can trickle down to the service you provide to your customers.”

However, not all types of i-deals have these undesirable effects. Xu’s research found that granting task i-deals to some employees have beneficial effects on the teams. Xu attributes that to the fact that people typically ask to be assigned to tasks they enjoy or are good at doing. Their colleagues may not be interested in those tasks or may view them as too difficult or tedious. The results are a better fitting differentiation of roles within teams, tailoring tasks, duties and responsibilities to each member’s talents and strengths.

Interestingly, and contrary to expectations, Xu’s research found no effects of negotiating and granting career i-deals on teams. However, Xu advises managers to remain cautious about potential fairness concerns, particularly in competitive team climates where employees are highly sensitive to comparisons of career advancement with their colleagues.

The team outlined their findings in the study titled I-deals for Some Employees May (Not) Be Ideal for the Team: Positive and Negative Relationships Between I-deals Differentiation and Team Effectiveness, published in Human Resource Management on September 25, 2025

Xu cautions that their findings should not be misinterpreted as though flexibility i-deals negotiation is bad for business. “We expect the undesirable effects of negotiating and granting flexibility i-deals to arise mainly in contexts where employees’ physical presence is critical for team coordination and performance, such as customer service settings like restaurants, as examined in our studies.” Xu explains.

He adds, “We don’t want to convey wrong information to institutions that flexibility i-deals shouldn't be negotiated. I see a lot of evidence supporting the companies’ benefits of flexibility i-deals in various settings, such as attracting and retaining star performers and uniquely skilled workforce. That is particularly true in academic settings, information technology, and other skilled professions when flexibility and autonomy are oftentimes inherent to the work and essential for driving creativity and innovation.”

Looking at how their research can be applied, Xu suggests that managers give employees room to negotiate the tasks they take on so that the employees can make the most of their unique strengths for the teams. Xu also offers ways to mediate the negative perspective of employees who feel that i-deals may be unfair. Managers should be transparent with team members as to why some are given greater flexibility or career opportunities, and how these non-standard arrangements may confer advantages to the organization’s overall productivity and success. “Managers can have candid discussions with their teams,” Xu says. “Transparency will go a long way and ultimately will benefit the organization as a whole.”

About Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, New Jersey. Since our founding in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark of Stevens’ education and research. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate closely with faculty in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment. Academic and research programs spanning business, computing, engineering, the arts and other disciplines actively advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront our most pressing global challenges. The university continues to be consistently ranked among the nation’s leaders in career services, post-graduation salaries of alumni and return on tuition investment.

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