The Role of Senior Business Leaders in Creating and Sustaining Work/Life Change

1999 / Location: The Wharton School

Sponsors

Allied Signal
American Express
Booz Allen & Hamilton
Ernst & Young
SAS Institute
Seagate Technology
Caliburn Partnerships
The Sloan Foundation

This conference focused on how senior executives can create work environments that encourage and enable employees’ integration of work and personal lives by modeling not balance, in the traditional sense of equal involvement in various life domains, but, rather, authenticity – the alignment of one’s actions and values.   This was a main theme of the research that took participants into the field, working in teams, to study the best practices of exemplary senior executives.

Based on the knowledge generated in this conference, Stew Friedman and Sharon Lobel published The Happy Workaholic: a role model for employees in the Academy of Management Executive.

Also, based on the field research for this conference four case studies were published in the International Journal of Leadership Education. These cases were listed on the Aspen Institute’s case materials Web site and have been conveyed to hundreds of educators, students, and researchers from around the world.