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We explore: (1) the effects of work unit pressure on employees’ satisfaction with work–family balance (S-WFB); (2) the effects of individual-level job and family pressures on S-WFB; and (3) the extent to which schedule control moderates the negative influences of work unit pressure and other demands on employee S-WFB – among employees in a large healthcare system.

The data come from employee responses to the baseline survey (n = 3,950) administered in September 2012, and from administrative unit-level data (445 units) showing the extent to which units were “on-budget” (within 5 percent), “over-budget,” or “under-budget.”

Practices associated with cost containment in a healthcare system of 10,000 employees in the United States appear to have a negative impact on employee S-WFB. Working in a unit that is “under-budget” is negatively associated with individual S-WFB. Employees with high job demands, longer hours, responsibilities for children and/or adults, also reported lower S-WFB than employees without these characteristics.

Research is limited by lack of measures specific to healthcare workers, the use of baseline data only, and sample size for some of the analyses.

Schedule control makes a difference even under high work pressure. The lack of interactions among variables that typically moderate relationships between work pressures and S-WFB suggests the need for more support for healthcare workers under the strain of cost containment.

We include an objective indicator of unit-level job pressures on individual employees, thus identifying specific ways that work stress affects S-WFB.

Drawing on the role theory and work–family border theory, this study aims to examine the relationship between work/family demands and sui generis forms of work–family conflict and further investigates the gender role ideology as a moderator of the relationship between work/family demands and work–family conflict.

The data were garnered with a self-reported questionnaire from randomly selected 569 employees working in the banking sector. As a caveat, nonresponse bias, common method variance and the reliability and validity of the measure were examined.

The results revealed that work demand and family demand were strongly related to both time- and strain-based work–family conflict; however, the relationship was not established with behavioural-based conflict. Notably, the findings affirmed the existence of a neglected form of psychological-based work–family conflict as the pièce de résistance and established a strong connection with its precursor. The dogma of gender role ideology, as a moderator, was indubitably confirmed and strengthened the positive relationship between family demand and family-to-work conflict.

The present study emphasises the importance of work/family demands and gender role ideology on work–family conflict. Consequently, it behoves human resource managers, strategists and practitioners to frame the organisational arrangements to alleviate the work–family conflict.

The present study fills a hiatus by establishing the relationship between work/family demand and work–family conflict with its cultural beliefs in the context of a collectivist culture.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether family-to-business support acts as a job resource that attenuates the negative effects of work demands on the stress and creativity of women micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector in Sri Lanka.

Data from 359 women micro-entrepreneurs and their respective case officers in local government were used to test the hypothesized relationship between work demands and their creativity through the mediating mechanism of stress and the moderating effect of family-to-business support on the said relationship.

Work demands reduced creativity through heightening the levels of stress faced by women micro-entrepreneurs. However, family-to-business support reduced the negative influence of work demands on creativity through stress.

Women micro-entrepreneurs should build strong family ties to obtain support from family members. In addition, government training programs that target women micro-entrepreneurs should be extended to include their immediate family members.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining whether family-to-business support buffers the negative effects of work demands for women micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector. In doing so it makes a theoretical contribution by testing the key tenets of the JD-R model in entrepreneurial settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in the relationships between job demands, job control and distress with the moderation effects of family status (i.e. marriage and parenthood) in the patriarchal cultural context of Korea.

The authors formulated hypotheses on the grounds of stress and role theories and tested them using a hierarchical regression analysis. A sample of 403 Korean employees (230 males; 173 females) was used for the analysis.

Family status moderated the relationship between job demands and distress for both males and females, whereas family status significantly moderated the effect of job control on distress for only males. Regardless of gender, marriage and parenthood were associated with distress affected by job demands, while only males exhibited significant distress in interactions between family status and job control.

This exploratory study is one of few that explicitly addresses the concepts of the job demands-control model dealing with the unique characteristics of demographic groups. By incorporating data from the single, the married and parents, this study identified applications of the conservation of resources and role theory for various family statuses in a non-Western culture. Particularly, this study is meaningful in that it highlighted the impacts of family roles on distress that can be observed in any culture, but is salient in a highly hierarchal, patriarchal and work-centered culture, like Korea.

The aim of the research is twofold: to explore relations between work/family demands, work‐family conflict (WFC), family‐work conflict (FWC) and wellbeing outcomes, and to contrast employees from an individualistic (UK) and a collectivistic (Taiwan) society.

Heterogeneous samples of full‐time employees in Taiwan and UK were surveyed using structured questionnaires.

For both the Taiwanese and British, work demands were positively related to WFC, whereas family demands were positively related to FWC. Both WFC and FWC were negatively related to wellbeing for employees in the two countries. More importantly, it was found that, for British, there was a stronger positive relation between workload and WFC, as well as a stronger positive relation between sharing household chores and FWC than for Taiwanese.

The relatively small sample size and the use of self‐report method are limitations of the present study. However, our results have both theoretical and practical implications. It is noted that Western findings regarding work/family issues may not generalize completely to a different cultural context. Consequently, company policies pertaining to work time and family issues should be re‐formulated, taking the core cultural values such as individualism‐collectivism into account.

The cross‐cultural comparative design is a major thrust of the present study, and the systematic examination of antecedents, moderators, and consequences of WFC and FWC is a rare effort in the field.

This study aims to examine the relationship of work–family demands with employees’ well-being, and the role of management/supervisory support in this relationship. The following hypotheses were proposed: work–family demands would be negatively related to employees’ well-being; management/supervisory support would moderate the relationship of work–family demands with employees’ well-being.

The researchers used 250 working female academicians as respondents, working in the research universities in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Their ages ranged from 30 to 60 years.

The findings of the present study proved that the work–family demands were negatively associated with employees’ well-being. Results also revealed that management and supervisory support strengthens the relationship between work–family demands and employees’ well-being. Thus, management and supervisory support plays an important role in balancing work demands and family roles and also in increasing working female academicians’ well-being.

In this study, management and supervisory support was found to be directly related to well-being, including life satisfaction, job satisfaction and family satisfaction. However, the direct relationship between management/supervisory support and well-being was positive and significant. This study also found that management/supervisor support reduced work–family conflict and work–family demands. Also, supervisory and management support was found to have a significant and positive relationship with well-being. Given these findings, supervisory and management support plays a very important role as a moderator of work–family demands and in developing and improving well-being in working women.

The current study seeks to argue that the constructs of work demand and family demand have been neglected in the work‐family conflict (WFC) literature. The authors aim to help clarify the definition and utilize direct measures of perceived work and family demand to test main effect, mediated, and interactive hypotheses.

A sample of 698 university employees participated in a comprehensive computer survey that considered various manifest indicators and multiple scales across work and family domains. Moderator hierarchical regression and LISREL 8.0 were used in analyzing the data.

The results indicate that both forms of demand have significant direct effects on work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW). Both demand constructs partially mediate the effects of three categories of domain variables on the two forms of conflict. Finally, the work demand‐WIF relationship is found to be stronger for those with relatively high family centrality.

A cross‐sectional design was used and may be problematic when examining relationships that occur over time. Further, capturing all scales with a single survey could result in common method bias, which may have inflated the predictive relationships.

Organizations can work to reduce WFC by adopting family‐friendly programs that help employees balance work and family demands. Specifically, this study implies that organizations should find ways to hold constant or reduce perceptions of work and family demand, along with other direct antecedents of WIF and FIW.

This study provides a relatively comprehensive model of antecedents that can be useful in future research. The authors also examine interactive effects of demand and work‐family centrality on conflict using direct measures of perceived demand. Methodologically, the research improves on some past studies by measuring perceived demand directly and by not narrowing our sample to employees who are married or those with children. Hopefully, these contributions will help stimulate continued growth in the work‐family literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating roles of work and family demands and work-life balance on the relationship between self-efficacy (to regulate work and life) and work engagement. Specifically, it seeks to explain how self-efficacy influences employees’ thought patterns and emotional reactions, which in turn enable them to cope with work and family demands, and ultimately achieve work-life balance and work engagement.

Structural equation modelling (SEM) of survey data obtained from a heterogeneous sample of 1,010 Australian employees is used to test the hypothesised chain mediation model.

The SEM results support the hypothesised model. Self-efficacy was significantly and negatively related to work and family demands, which in turn were negatively associated with work-life balance. Work-life balance, in turn, enabled employees to be engaged in their work.

The findings support the key tenets of social cognitive theory and conservation of resources (COR) theory and demonstrate how self-efficacy can lead to work-life balance and engagement despite the presence of role demands. Study limitations (e.g. cross-sectional research design) and future research directions are discussed.

This study incorporates COR theory with social cognitive theory to improve understanding of how self-efficacy enhances work-life balance and work engagement through a self-fulfilling cycle in which employees achieve what they believe they can accomplish, and in the process, build other skills and personal resources to manage work and family challenges.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the context dependence of the implications of telework for work–family conflict. It examines whether and how the implications of telework for strain-based and time-based work–family conflict depend on work–family-supportive and high-demand workplace cultures. Based on a sample of 4,898 employees derived from a unique linked employer–employee study involving large organizations in different industries in Germany, multilevel fixed-effects regressions were estimated.

The results show that telework is associated with perceived higher levels of both time-based and strain-based work–family conflict, and that this is partly related to overtime work involved in telework. However, teleworkers experience higher levels of work–family conflict if they perceive their workplace culture to be highly demanding, and lower levels if supervisor work–family support is readily available.

Future research is required to investigate how the conclusions from this research vary between heterogonous employees and how work–family-supportive and high-demand workplace cultures interrelate in their implications on the use of telework for work–family conflict.

The findings show how important it is to implement telework in a way that not only accommodates employers’ interest in flexibilization, but that it also makes it possible to reconcile work with a family life that involves high levels of responsibility.

This is the first study which examines whether telework is either a resource that reduces or a demand that promotes work–family conflict by focusing on whether this depends on perceived workplace culture.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how employed single-parents differ from parents in two-parent families in their experience of work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC). Looking at job-related as well as family-related demands and resources, this research investigated to what degree these demands and resources contribute to differences in WFC and FWC, how their relevance in predicting conflicts varies between single parents and other parents and the role of compositional differences in work and family demands and resources.

Cross-sectional linear regression analyses were applied to analyze a random sample of employees in large work organizations in Germany. The sample included 3,581 parents with children up to the age of 25, of whom 346 were single parents.

The results indicated that single parents face more FWC, but not more WFC, than other parents. For all parents, job demands such as overtime, supervising responsibilities and availability expectations were associated with higher levels of WFC, whereas job resources such as job autonomy, support from supervisors and flexible working hours were associated with lower levels of WFC. In predicting FWC, family demands and resources played only a minor role. However, results provide only scant evidence of differences between single parents and other parents in terms of the effects of job and family demands and resources.

This study offers interesting insights into the diversity of WFC and FWC experiences in Germany. It provides first evidence of the impact of job and family demands and resources on both directions of work–family conflicts among employed single parents as a specific social group.