The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

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Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Denise Marie-Therese Rousseau has undertaken a study of individualized perks employees have arranged for themselves in the workplace. Name: Denise Marie-Therese Rousseau Age: 54 Residence: Indiana Township Position: H.J. Heinz II professor of organizational behavior and public policy, Carnegie Mellon University. Education: Bachelor's degree in anthropology and psychology; master's in psychology; doctorate in psychology, University of California at Berkeley, 1973-1977. Previous positions: Instructor, University of California at Berkeley, 1973-77; psychology professor, University of Michigan, 1977-81; organizational behavior professor, Northwestern University, 1981-94. Professional honors: National Institute for Health Care Management research award, 1994; George R. Terry Award for best book on management, 1996 and 2006; president, Academy of Management, 2004-05; visiting professorships at University of Notre Dame , Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, Singapore Management University and Leeds University in Great Britain. Publications: Author and editor of 11 books, including award winners "Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements," and "I-DEALS: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves." 120 articles in journals and professional publications. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

Americans are used to reading about the special deals that celebrities demand, from the all-white dressing room Jennifer Lopez insists on to the police escorts that Christina Aguilera requires.

It can leave the impression that individualized perks are reserved for the rich and famous.

But nothing could be further from the truth, says Denise Rousseau, the H.J. Heinz II professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

At many businesses in the United States and Europe, her research shows, between 25 percent and 35 percent of all employees have bargained for special workplace arrangements, which she calls idiosyncratic deals, or "i-deals."

The i-deals can take many forms: reduced or flexible hours, working from home, travel limitations, child-care assistance and career development opportunities.

They also can cover pay, but Dr. Rousseau said she was surprised to learn in her surveys that there are relatively few special deals on salaries, possibly because they can create more feelings of unfairness among other employees.

As she wrote in her award-winning 2005 book "I-DEALS: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves," the number and variety of these special perks are spreading rapidly.

That's generally a good thing, she believes, because companies that encourage i-deals tend to promote a sense of flexibility and empowerment.

But i-deals also can be tricky to implement, she said, and if they are not fashioned carefully, they can cause problems for the workers and the employers.

Most of the deals, her work shows, cover one of three areas: reduced hours, flexible hours or career development opportunities.

Unfortunately, those who bargain for different hours, many of whom are women with family obligations, often find it hurts their careers further down the line.

"One of the things we know from tracking employees," she said, "is that people who bargain for something that makes them noncompliant with basic employment standards -- so they have fewer hours than everybody else or their hours are different -- have to be careful what they ask for.

"When performance review time comes, the person with the flexible hours, the person who's not there as often, who's working from home, or is commuting from out of state, is often evaluated as a less satisfactory employee."

Dr. Rousseau said she doesn't necessarily believe that's fair, but it does seem to be a fact of life in the workplace.

There is a way however, to overcome the disadvantage of not having as much "face time" as other employees, she said.

A worker with special hours needs to meet with her supervisor after the first few months, or even once every six months, to make sure she is meeting the manager's expectations, and vice versa.

Dr. Rousseau has found that workers who continually update their i-deals suffer far less when it comes time for promotions or other career advancements.

The only kind of i-deals that both employers and employees clearly see as "win-win," she said, are career development agreements such as special training, tuition support and challenging work assignments.

"That's because it means employees are committing to make a bigger investment in the organization than they might have otherwise in order to be promoted, in order to learn more, in order to get new skills," she said.

Companies could stand to fashion even more of these developmental deals than they do now, she said -- especially in Pittsburgh.

In her work as a consultant, she has found that companies in Pittsburgh are far less focused on developing their employees' skills and opportunities than in many other regions of the nation.

"Human resources departments in Pittsburgh tend to be more personnel departments than human resource development venues. What I mean by that is they're really not looking to develop employees throughout their life cycles. Instead, they're fighting fires and focusing on problem employees rather than focusing on development."

She thinks that may stem from the region's industrial legacy, which featured companies "that didn't see their organizations as being knowledge-oriented or developmental; they saw them as being capital intensive organizations in which they tried to maintain their edge with investments in equipment and maintenance."

Dr. Rousseau grew up in a blue-collar family in Santa Rosa, Calif., and said she chose her research field largely because of her father.

"My father hated his job," she wrote in one book. "He probably should have been a high school history teacher or basketball coach. Instead of going to college or pursuing work that interested him, with a large number of brothers and sisters to support ... he went to work for the telephone company, first as a lineman and then a cable splicer ... for 36 years.

"It was the political and abusive behavior of company foremen and managers that my father talked about at dinner. My father's dissatisfaction ... led me to focus on the lives of workers, and especially of ... those who work for somebody aside from themselves."

One lesson she learned from her father is that the workplace should benefit everybody -- not just an employer and a particular employee, but the employee's co-workers as well.

For that reason, she said, i-deals have to be perceived as fair by virtually everyone in the workplace.

To put it another way, she said, "there's a slippery slope between an i-deal and a shady deal."

She puts idiosyncratic deals in three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.

In a good deal, she said, "the person gets the benefit he wants, the company gets a loyal employee and it can then signal to other employees that the company tries very hard to develop its people."

The bad deal is characterized by favoritism, she said.

"That might be a case where I'm the boss's cousin so if I'm late coming back from lunch nobody says anything, but if you do it, you get yelled at. All that does is erode trust. It says it's who you know, not what you bring to the table, that determines the kind of benefits you get."

The ugly deal, she said, involves unethical behavior, as when a retail manager sets aside an expensive outfit and then waits for a sale to buy it for himself.

Employers don't usually consent to ugly deals, she said, but they often tolerate them, especially if they believe they can't find anyone else to fill a particular job.

Finally, she noted, i-deals should never be a substitute for good basic pay and benefits at a company.

"The value of i-deals is best as a supplement, not a substitute, for standardized arrangements that attract and motivate the kind of high-caliber workforce that an organization needs.

"No employee should have to bargain for something everybody needs. If you have to bargain for health care benefits, what kind of employer is that? If you have to bargain for some ability to save for retirement, what kind of employer is that?

"So my pitch to companies is, get your standardized [pay and benefits] in order first, and then if you really want to ... make employment much more valuable with your company than someone can get someplace else," give employees the kind of individualized deals that seem fair to everyone.

"There is nothing in my concept of justice that says all people should be treated the same," Dr. Rousseau said. "It's the idea that when a company allocates benefits, everybody is better off than they would be otherwise."