In recent years, organizations have expanded the number and types of work-life policies they offer in an attempt to attract and retain talent. We challenge the assumption that work-life policies uniformly signal personal-life support and elicit favorable employee attitudes by investigating a relatively new work-life policy: egg freezing coverage. We theorize that, relative to other work-life policies, egg freezing coverage is more likely to send signals that evoke negative employee attitudes; although framed as intended to support employees' personal lives, employees interpret egg freezing as signaling that personal-life sacrifice and work prioritization are encouraged, which in turn decrease policy support and organizational attraction. We test these ideas in six studies, including an archival study, a qualitative survey study, a scale development study, two quantitative survey studies, and an experiment. We find egg freezing coverage evokes more negative attitudes than a range of other work-life policies (in vitro fertilization [IVF], on-site childcare, paid parental leave, flextime) as well as no policy at all. More negative reactions to egg freezing than to other policies are driven by perceptions that the policy sends a stronger signal that personal-life sacrifice is encouraged, as well as perceptions that it offers fewer benefits to employees and is more costly to organizations. In all, this work expands understanding of the signaling effects of work-life policies and demonstrates that reactions to a range of work-life policies are both more variable and driven by a larger number of underlying factors than prior theory can account for. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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进步还是压力？卵子冷冻覆盖率和其他工作生活政策的信号效应。

近年来，组织扩大了他们提供的工作生活政策的数量和类型，以试图吸引和留住人才。我们通过调查一项相对较新的工作生活政策：卵子冷冻覆盖率来挑战工作生活政策统一表示个人生活支持并引发员工积极态度的假设。我们的理论是，相对于其他工作-生活政策，卵子冷冻保险更有可能发出引起员工消极态度的信号；尽管旨在支持员工的个人生活，但员工将卵子冷冻理解为鼓励牺牲个人生活和优先考虑工作的信号，这反过来会减少政策支持和组织吸引力。我们在六项研究中检验了这些想法，包括档案研究、定性调查研究、一项规模发展研究、两项定量调查研究和一项实验。我们发现，与其他一系列工作-生活政策（体外受精 [IVF]、现场儿童保育、带薪育儿假、弹性工作制）相比，卵子冷冻覆盖范围更容易引发负面态度，而且根本没有任何政策。与其他政策相比，对卵子冷冻的更多负面反应是由于人们认为该政策发出了更强烈的信号，即鼓励牺牲个人生命，以及认为它为员工提供的福利更少，对组织的成本更高。总而言之，这项工作扩展了对工作-生活政策的信号效应的理解，并证明了对一系列工作-生活政策的反应比先前的理论可以解释的更多变，并且受到更多潜在因素的驱动。