Search results

Research has shown that, when employees’ work-family conflict levels are reduced, performance in the workplace can increase. How to reduce these levels, however, is a complex task. The purpose of this empirical study was to investigate the differences in work-family conflict between full-time worksite employees and full-time teleworking employees (individuals who teleworked from home at least two days per week). Employees (n = 308) in seven for-profit companies in Minnesota were sampled and surveyed using a slightly revised version of the Carlson and Kacmar (2000) work-family conflict scale. The findings indicate that teleworkers had lower levels of overall work-family conflict as well as most of the other work-family conflict variables explored (i.e., strain-based, time-based, work interference with family, family interference with work)

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of various workplace characteristics on work-family conflict among dual-career couples in India.

Primary data based on 393 employees belonging to dual-career couples were analyzed. Using multiple regression analysis, the study has attempted to find out the effects of workplace characteristics on work-family conflict in dual-career couples.

The findings indicate that not all workplace characteristics effect work-family conflict in dual-career couples. Out of 13 characteristics, 8 workplace characteristics, namely, development and flexibility, co-worker support, supervisory support, job competence, self-employee control, practicing overtime, flexibility and discrimination, are found to have significant effects on work-family conflict in dual-career couples.

As this study is limited to the dual-career couples employed mainly in organizations operating in India, these results may not be generalized to other areas such as traditional career couples, self-employed member of couples and in other national contexts.

It would be beneficial for organizations to understand and implicate that adoption of certain workplace characteristics provide appropriate choices, freedom and environment for dual-career employees, which further encourage them to build effective amalgamation of work and family roles suiting their individual circumstances.

This study is an important and almost first study on dual-career couples in India on such issues. As a very scant number of researches have examined the impact of workplace characteristics on work-family conflict on such extensive basis, it definitely contributes to HR literature.

Examines the influence of family‐ and work‐specific determinants of multiple forms of family interference with work (FIW) and work interference with family (WIF) conflict. Using a Hong Kong university sample (including both academic and non‐academic staff), finds that parental demands and hours spent on household work were important determinants of FIW conflict and that role conflict, role overload, and hours spent on paid work influenced WIF conflict. Differential gender effects for FIW and WIF conflict support the traditional gender roles embedded in Confucian ethics. Moderating effects of spouse support, supervisor support and domestic support were also found, although the latter was opposite to the direction hypothesized. Implications for future researchers and managers are discussed.

The trend of domestic employment thrives almost in every society. It is most common in developing countries and Nigeria is no exception. This paper aims to examine the nature of the role of a domestic worker in Nigeria and the work-life conflict issues involved in such work.

This study uses a qualitative research approach to examine the nature of the role of domestic workers and the associated work-life conflict issues.

The findings show that the nature of the jobs of domestic workers in Nigeria gives rise to a situation of modern-day slavery in which an employee works without a formal employment contract, with little or no rights to private time. Long and unstructured working hours, employers’ perceptions about domestic workers and a huge workload fuel and exacerbate work-life conflict amongst domestic workers in Nigeria.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited and selected sample of the research and the research context.

The primacy of the employer over the employee in domestic employment means that both time and work-based conflicts continue to buffer work-life conflict if domestic workers’ working hours remain unscheduled and their employers’ perceptions about them remain unchanged. This invariably has a negative impact on the domestic workers’ health and productivity. Therefore, domestic employment should be regulated by law and domestic workers should be treated like other formal employees.

This study contributes to the debates on the work-life conflict by highlighting the nature of the role of domestic workers in a non-western context, Nigeria and provides a nuanced insight into the work-life conflict issues involved in such work. The findings add conceptual thought and empirical evidence to the debate on work-life conflict.

Researchers have used different approaches to understand how individuals combine work with family, one being boundary and transition management. However, very few studies have focussed on empirically examining the role of individual boundary management style on work-family experience. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by examining the role of integration-segmentation on work-family conflict (WFC) and work-family enrichment (WFE). Two secondary purposes are to explore gender differences in work-family experiences and to examine the relationship between WFC and WFE.

The predictor variable in the primary study is integration (with two levels segmented and integrated). Different measures of WFC and WFE are criterion variables. Survey method was used to collect data from 156 life insurance professionals including 64 women employees in India. The average age of the sample is 35 years (SD=6.56). Boundary strategy of integration or segmentation between work and family is determined by measuring similarity in resource priority between work and family. Median split technique is used to delineate the groups.

The study has three key findings: employees with integrated boundary strategy report greater levels of both WFC and WFE; no gender differences exist in the experience of WFC and WFE; and WFC and WFE were found to be unrelated to each other.

The paper empirically studies the role of boundaries on WFC and WFE of insurance employees. It is a response to researchers’ call to integrate boundary theory with spillover theory and examine the role of integration-segmentation.

The aim of this paper is to advance the conceptualisation and measurement of work-family conflict (WFC) by developing and validating a scale that is relevant in a collectivist culture setting.

First, qualitative interviews with 15 bank employees were conducted to establish whether WFC was an issue, its meaning and form and the relevance of the Carlson, Kacmar and Williams' (2000) scale. Second, drawing on role theory and work-family border theory, an additional psychological dimension was developed, and the new scale was tested with data from a self-report survey of bank employees (n = 569). Third, the validity, reliability and measurement invariance of the scale were confirmed with data from a sample of secondary school teachers (n = 223).

The characteristics of collective societies pertinent to WFC were relevant to these middle-class employees, and they experience high levels of WFC. A model with a six-factor structure (time-based, strain-based and psychological-based WFC and FWC) represents the most theoretically and statistically sound measure of WFC for these samples.

WFC has many negative social and economic consequences. However, there is inadequate evidence on which to base human resource policies to address the issue in collective societies. This study developed and applied a more reliable measure to assess its extent and form to assist in the design of appropriate WFC management practice. It will be of interest to scholars researching and teaching international management, management consultants, policy makers and managers seeking to understand the problem of WFC in collective societies.

This is the first study to establish the validity of a psychological dimension of WFC in a collectivist culture. It confirms the relevance of the strain and time dimensions of the most commonly used multi-dimensional measure, but found no evidence of behavioural WFC.

Conflict between work and family is a significant issue for entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of entrepreneurial failure on both family–work conflict (FWC) and work–family conflict (WFC) and the moderating role of perceived control of time and organizational slack based on conservation of resources (COR) theory.

This study used a questionnaire to explore the relationship between entrepreneurial failure, FWC/WFC, perceived control of time and organizational slack. Data were collected from the Chinese context in 2018 and as a result received 318 valid questionnaires, obtaining a response rate of 63.6 per cent.

The study finds that entrepreneurial failure has a significant relationship with FWC but a nonsignificant relationship with WFC and that perceived control of time and organizational slack moderate the relationship between entrepreneurial failure and FWC/WFC.

This study aligns the field of family–work (work–family) conflict and entrepreneurial failure. It addresses a research gap in the conflict literature by introducing one form of resource loss: entrepreneurial failure as a source of conflict between work and family based on COR theory and the work–home resources model. The study also enriches the literature on the social cost of entrepreneurial failure by exploring the crossover effect of entrepreneurial failure on conflicts in the family domain. Furthermore, the study advances the understanding of managing conflict between work and family after entrepreneurial failure.

Family and work life have always been interdependent, because the increased employment of mothers, rising family hours of work, today’s service-intensive globalizing economy, and the trend toward work long hours for some and inadequate family income for the others have rendered this interdependence both more visible and more problematic. The extent to which an individual carries out their duties and responsibilities at work and home varies from one person to the other and how they balance up their roles and duties can be determined by a number of factors which include job-related factors, family-related factors, and individual factors.

A total of 255 married participants were randomly selected from the private sector, which includes banks, insurance companies, and telecommunication firms, in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria. Data was elicited through the use of questionnaires as well as interview.

Findings from the chi-squared analysis used for this study showed that there is a significant relationship between work obligation and family commitment among couples in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria.

One limitation of this study was that it was concentrated only on workers in the private sector. It was also limited by the methods of carrying out the research. The study emphasizes proper planning and time management, effective work schedule as well as an analysis of factors affecting work performance particularly, family duties, and how these affect the level of performance of individuals in their respective places of work.

To cope with the workforce shortages brought by population ageing, it is critical to understand the workplace micro-foundations that determine the mechanisms of older workers' early retirement intentions. Drawing on the conservation of resource theory, this study examines the spillover effect of strain-based family-to-work conflict (SFWC) on early retirement intentions, with emotional exhaustion as a mediator. Additionally, it investigates the contextual resources, HR practice flexibility, as a boundary condition for the above relationships.

The study tests the hypotheses by employing a multi-sourced matching sample of 231 workers (aged 45–65) and their 49 managers.

The results of cross-level analysis revealed that SFWC has a positive indirect relationship with early retirement intentions, through increased emotional exhaustion. The relationship between emotional exhaustion and early retirement intentions is weaker when older employees experience higher HR practice flexibility.

This study is the first to use a resources perspective to analyse early retirement mechanisms, and it examines the spillover effect of SFWC on early retirement intentions. The findings also contribute to the literature on the role of HR practice for ageing workers.

Despite widespread acknowledgement that work‐family conflict and career success are salient issues that impact individual wellbeing and organizational effectiveness, there is little research that studies how the two concepts are related. The purpose of this paper is to develop and present a tentative framework for understanding the relationships among antecedents of interrole conflict between work and family and career success.

Drawing on existing theoretical and empirical evidence the paper develops and presents a conceptual framework of the relationships between domain‐specific variables, work‐family conflict, and career success. The paper also presents propositions based on the relationships suggested by the framework.

The framework suggests that individual‐specific variables will be more likely to predict family‐to‐work conflict and perceived career success, while work‐specific variables will be more likely to predict work‐to‐family conflict and perceived career success. It also suggests that such domain‐specific variables influence both work‐family conflict and career success.

Future research should examine empirically the linkages suggested by this framework, along with other domain‐specific and, perhaps, cultural‐specific variables that may explain or predict dimensions of organizational cultures that are most relevant to the types of work‐family conflict and to indicators of career success. The paper suggests that employees and employers would be well advised to identify appropriate strategies for balancing work and non‐work domains in such a way that employees strive to perform work and family roles successfully, and employers ensure that employees have the necessary “infrastucture” and tailored‐made family supportive programs to encourage them to achieve dual‐success: success in family relationships and success in careers.

This paper makes a valuable contribution to both the work‐family conflict and career success literatures by being one of the first to examine the effects of domain‐specific characteristics on the relationships between these important organizational concepts and by revealing that managing work‐family conflict and career decision making is relevant for employees, employers, and career consultants.