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Flexible working hours may not be as flexible as you think - and could actually ruin your career, researchers have warned.

The say the old saying that the early bird catches the worm is true.

Bosses were found to have an 'early bias', favouring employees who, even though they were on flexi-time, arrived early.

Breakfast at your desk? Researchers found that those who arrived early, even if they were on flextime, were better rewarded

Flextime has been introduced in dozens of major firms.

Google allows many employees to set their own hours, while Microsoft, many employees can choose when to start their day, as long as it's between 9am and 11am, and at KPMG, 70 percent of employees work flexible hours.

Christopher Barnes of the University of Washington, who led the research, decided to see if workers were, as it has been claimed, being penalised for working flexi-hours.

'Perhaps, we hypothesized, it matters in which direction an employee shifts hours,' he wrote.

'People seem to have a tendency to celebrate early-risers.

'Witness the enduring popularity of aphorisms like Ben Franklin's 'early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise' or, in China, 'a day's planning should be done in the morning.'

The team first questioned people to find if the stereotype was widely known, and found across 120 participants, on average people do make a greater natural implicit association between morning and conscientiousness.

'The field study we conducted tested the hypothesis that supervisor ratings of conscientiousness and performance would be associated with the timing of an employee's work day.

'The hypothesis was supported. '

Across 149 employee-supervisor relationships, employees who started work earlier in the day were rated by their supervisors as more conscientious, and thus received higher performance ratings, the team found.

The researchers found that workers were, as it has been claimed, being penalised for working flexi-hours.

The researchers then devised a lab experiment to test the theory.

Participants in the role of being a supervisor, and asked them to rate the performance of a fictitious employee.

However, in the 'morning' condition the fictional employee tended to work from 7am to 3pm, and in the 'evening' condition we indicated that the fictional employee tended to work from 11am to 7pm.

Participants gave higher ratings of conscientiousness and performance to the 7am-3pm employees than to the 11am-7pm employees.

The researchers concluded that emploters needed to make more effort to recognise workers who arrived later.

'One way or another, team leaders must come to accept that the people who use flextime to start their day late are not necessarily lazier than their early-bird colleagues.

'Otherwise, flextime policies that could serve both employees and employers well will become known, and avoided, as routes to dead-end careers.'