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In many organizations, managers routinely negotiate individualized work arrangements with employees, known to researchers as idiosyncratic deals or, more simply, "i-deals." I-deals are "voluntary, personalized agreements of a nonstandard nature negotiated between employees and their employers regarding terms that benefit each party" (Rousseau, Ho, and Greenberg 2006, p. 978). The most distinguishing characteristics of i-deals are that they are person-specific and differentiated from the standard employment arrangements or plans under which other comparable employees are being managed (Conway and Coyle-Shapiro 2015).
I-deals commonly relate to situations such as employee requests for scheduling flexibility, work location flexibility, changes to task/work responsibilities, special compensation arrangements, or career and skill development (Rosen et al. 2013; Rousseau, Hornung, and Kim 2009). They often arise in response to emerging or unexpected needs. For example, as workers use up their available paid time off (e.g., as occurred often during the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic), some might ask to bring a child to work to do remote schoolwork in an unused part of the workplace, or they may request additional (paid or unpaid) time off if they or family members get sick (Weber 2020). For employees, i-deals are associated with more positive work attitudes, particularly for arrangements involving changes to task/work responsibilities and those involving scheduling flexibility (Liao, Wayne, and Rousseau 2016; Rosen et al. 2013). Financial i-deals may also be associated with better individual performance for i-deal recipients in certain pay-for-performance settings (Maltarich et al. 2017). Co-worker reactions to others' i-deals, however, vary depending on the nature of i-deals, and the work context. For example, recent research suggests that there can be a decline in peers' performance in response to financial i-deals (i.e., exceptions made) to underperformers in a pay-for-performance system (Abdusalam et al. in press). Scheduling flexibility and workload changes tend to be viewed more favorably by peers than financial i-deals, but even nonfinancial i-deals may be viewed unfavorably when work is highly interdependent (Marescaux, De Winne, and Sels 2019). Contextual factors that likely affect these co-worker reactions include whether granting of i-deals is consistent with organizational norms that allow for differential treatment of employees (Garg and Fulmer 2017) and how prevalent i-deals are in a group (Abdusalam et al. in press). These factors, in turn, derive at least in part...