Complexities and challenges in the work-family interface
The Authors
Noreen Heraty, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Michael J. Morley, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Jeanette N. Cleveland, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this brief paper is to introduce the papers in this special issue of Journal of Managerial Psychology, focused on “Complexities and challenges in the work-family interface”.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper first introduces the theme of the special issue, and a brief outline of each paper contained in it is given.
Findings – There is concern that progress in the work-family research area has been somewhat restricted and may have failed to take sufficient account of the complexity of work-family issues.
Originality/value – The literature on the work-family interface is complex, and theory in the field is uncertain and under-developed. The papers in this special issue should further understanding of the challenges and complexities underscoring the work-family interface.
Article Type:
Viewpoint
Keyword(s):
Family; Sociology of work.
Journal:
Journal of Managerial Psychology
Volume:
23
Number:
3
Year:
2008
pp:
209-214
Copyright ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:
0268-3946
Work-family relationships are complex and multidimensional and remain an important ongoing academic and social policy area that requires multidisciplinary and multi-level investigation and collaboration. Growing out of research on inter-role conflict (Kahn et al., 1964), historically work-family research has tended to focus on relationships between specific work and family variables and usually from either a family-focused or a work-focused perspective. This has resulted in an expanding body of research coalescing around the perceived ability of individuals to control stressors stemming from one or other of the work and family domains. In their review of 190 work-family studies published in IO/OB, Eby et al. (2005, p. 180) note that while there is a growing body of research to suggest that work and family can positively influence one another, there is far more that points to a negative spillover in terms of work-family conflict.
The literature on the work-family interface is complex on several accounts. Theory in the field is uncertain and underdeveloped. Concepts, often loosely defined, abound and many of the relationships between them are not well understood. Empirical efforts are variable and the implications, especially for organisations, are often unclear. Despite these complexities, however, the work-family interface is an area of immense importance, personally, professionally and socially, as increasing numbers of families attempt to juggle work and family commitments and experience underlying difficulties in so doing. At the individual level, tensions in the work-family interface have been adjudged to affect, inter alia, stress, well-being, reduced spousal and parental effectiveness, decreased life satisfaction and increased psychologically threatening activities. In the work and organisational sphere, critical issues include the potential for a negative impact on organisational commitment (affective and continuance), job performance, job satisfaction, absenteeism and turnover. At the societal level, concerns relate to family disruption and community disconnect, reduced social citizenship and community engagement.
Against this backdrop, there is an ongoing concern that progress in the work-family research area has been somewhat restricted and may have failed to take sufficient account of the complexity of work-family issues. Voydanoff (1988, 2005) calls for a better reconceptualisation of the work-family field (to include non-paid work and non-traditional family structures) and better measures of work-family fit and balance; Kossek and Ozeki (1998) similarly call for more consistency and robustness in measurement, and better sampling techniques; Barnett and Hyde (2001) call for new ways of thinking about the work-family interface, which Rotondo et al. (2003) describe as a permeable boundary; while Zedeck and Mosier (1990) and Frone (2003) highlight developments in organisational strategies and policies for promoting work-family balance at the individual and organisational level. Moreover, there appears to be a dearth of research that focuses on the larger macro societal level within which work and family domains exist and which can play a highly influential role in the work-family interface.
This special issue brings together six papers that further our understanding of the challenges and complexities underscoring the work-family interface, an interface which has been characterised as one of the primary social challenges of our era because of the perceived imbalance which people experience in these domain areas of their lives (Halpern, 2005). The range of issues tackled here is both timely and insightful and opens up new lines of enquiry in addition to deepening previous research efforts. Thematically, the papers address the following:
- the development of direct measures of perceived work demand and family demand in order to overcome construct difficulties apparent in the literature heretofore;
- the testing of an expanded model of effort-reward imbalance (ERI) in predicting work-life conflict;
- the examination of self and partner perceptions of work family interference among dual earner couples;
- the exploration of whether spillover from non-work to work contributes to individuals' wellbeing;
- the analysis of the consequences of family responsibilities for career success; and
- the development of a new model of the adjustment of expatriate families to living abroad.
Our first paper, by Scott Boyar, Carl Maertz, Donald Mosley and Jon Carr, explores the domain areas of work demand and family demand that are seen to impact work-family conflict (both work interfering with family, or WIF, and family interfering with work, or FIW). The authors note that while there is general agreement that increased demand leads to increased conflict, to date no direct measures of demand have been identified. Using a sample of 698 university employees, this paper seeks to develop new knowledge in this area. Demand is defined as a global perception of the level and intensity of responsibility within the work or family domain. Here, the authors argue that this demand must be subjectively experienced for it to influence WIF or FIW. Moreover, they propose that work and family domain variables act to influence levels of perceived work and family demand. In contrast to earlier research, the authors propose that perceived work demand and perceived family demand fully mediate the relationship between work and family domain variables, and WIF and FIW. Finally, the authors consider the relationship between work/family centrality and various demand effects. Their results confirm that work domain and family domain variables do indeed influence perceived work and family demand. Although not fully supported, their results suggest that these two forms of demand partially mediate the effects of domain variables on conflict. Furthermore, the relative strength of the demand-conflict relationship was partly determined by values of work/family centrality.
In our second contribution to this Special Issue, Gail Kinman and Fiona Jones propose an expanded model of effort-reward imbalance, over-commitment and work-life conflict based on a study of 1,108 university employees in the UK. A key focus of this paper is to enhance knowledge of the well-established effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model of job stress proposed by Siegrist (1996) by examining its performance as a predictor of perceived conflict between work and home. This ERI model suggests that employees' perceived imbalance/inequity between the effort they put into their jobs and the rewards that they receive is experienced as stressful and is likely to compromise heath and well-being over time. It also predicts that this imbalance will be experienced more frequently by employees who are seen as over-committed to their work. Beyond this, the authors here test whether factors associated with support for work-life balance such as degree of integration/segmentation between work and home, and individual working practices (scheduling flexibility, organisational support for balance), account for additional variance in work-life conflict over that explained by the ERI components.
Their results suggest that the components of the ERI model are powerful predictors of work-life conflict. They further found evidence that lack of schedule flexibility and higher levels of work-life integration (fewer boundaries) are independent risk factors that are considered likely to compromise work life balance suggesting the importance of monitoring specific working conditions and occupational cultures, and providing promising avenues for further research in this area.
Our third contribution comes from Michelle Streich, Wendy Casper and Amy Salvaggio, and it examines the interesting angle of couple agreement about work-family conflict. The authors note that much research to date has focused on how workers experience and manage conflict between their work and family roles. The point of departure in this paper is that, while WIF is becoming increasingly better understood, it has not really been examined from the couple perspective. To this end the authors provide an empirical examination of self and partner perceptions of WIF among 224 dual earner couples. Using family systems theory to explain how individuals' attitudes are affected by other family members' attitudes and behaviours, the authors explore to what extent couples agree about their WIF, and whether this agreement has a moderating effect on individual level organisational commitment. Building on the established relationship between WFC and both affective and continuance commitment, the authors here are interested in exploring whether influences from the family system are seen to act as moderators on the relationship between organisational commitment and WFC. The issue of gender differences with respect to agreement on WIF is also taken up, in recognition that evidence to date suggests that women generally report more WIF than men.
The results highlight substantial agreement among couples when rating the WIF experienced by both male and female partners, though agreement was found to be higher when rating female WIF. Interestingly, couple agreement about female WIF was found to moderate the relationship between her self-rated WIF and her continuance commitment (the relationship was weaker when agreement was high). This suggests that spouse support can act to reduce WFC and is in broadly in line with the general view that social support acts as a moderator of the stressor-strain relationship. Moreover, the authors posit that WIF contributes to decreased affective commitment and increased continuance commitment suggesting that those who experience higher WIF may well have poorer work performance overall.
Studies investigating the relationship between work and specific non-work roles (excluding family roles) are relatively few and this sets the context for our next contribution by Pam Allis and Michael O'Driscoll. While there have been many investigations of conflict between the two domain areas of work and non-work, their paper examine the positive effects of non work-to-work facilitation on well-being in work family and personal domains and seeks to examine whether spillover from non-work to work can be seen to contribute to individual well-being. Focusing specifically on family and personal benefit activities, they test the relationship between time demands in these domains and conflict between these roles and work. Personal benefit activities are defined as those that an individual undertakes that are associated with feelings of freedom, intrinsic satisfaction, positive mood and with consequent benefit for well-being. The authors propose that there is a positive knock-on effect (facilitation) from these activities but there may also be time conflicts associated with them. Utilising the enhancement hypothesis associated with multiple roles, and with a sample of 938 New Zealand local government employees, they test whether participation in one domain area (work) is made easier because of the experiences, skills and resources gained or developed in different domains (family/personal benefits). They further investigate whether the time demands associated with these activities has a consequent effect on work conflict.
Their results point to moderate levels of family to work facilitation and personal activities to work. They found that high psychological involvement in a non-work domain correlated positively with facilitation to the work domain. However, involvement in personal benefits activities does not significantly relate with positive well-being. They propose that individuals need to develop strategies to enhance facilitation levels across different domains since facilitation is positively associated with well-being.
In our fifth paper, Wolfgang Mayrhofer, Michael Meyer, Michael Schiffinger and Angelika Schmidt take us through the influence of family responsibilities, career fields and gender on career success. The authors contend that family responsibilities are an important factor influencing the amount of time and energy individuals are able and willing to devote to work, i.e. their work centrality. In turn, work centrality is seen to be positively related to both objective and subjective dimensions of career success. They further contend that the work and career context of the individual constitute important factors when analysing the effects of family situations on career success. Here they identify job alternatives and changeability of work content and professional relationships as key factors in the work context. Using a sample of 305 business school graduates, they test the consequences of family responsibilities for their career success, and the influence of career context variables and gender on this relationship. Overall the impact of family responsibility on work centrality is negative, though not significantly so for men. Furthermore, work centrality was positively linked with both subjective and objective career success, which points to a negative relationship between family responsibilities and objective and subjective career success via work centrality. The authors found support for the effect of contextual factors on the relationship between family situations and career success. Changeability, for example, was found to be positively related to work centrality, for both men and women. Finally, evidence of gender effects was found to exist throughout, and as expected in most instances. The authors conclude that the results underscore the important relationship between external factors such as family responsibilities and work-related factors such as work centrality and career success, and point to the role of HR systems in managing the work-family interface.
Our final contribution to this special issue comes from Arno Haslberger and Chris Brewster, who provide a theoretical exploration of work-family conflict from the perspective of the expatriate family. As the number of people who are sent abroad by their organisation continues to grow, and with recent figures suggesting that about 60 per cent of these are accompanied by a spouse/partner and about 50 per cent by their children, there remains a critical need to understand the work-family interface in expatriate assignments. Indeed, the authors suggest that evidence from both expatriate and family research shows systematic omissions about work-family interface among this population.
Citing the FAAR model of Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response by Patterson (1988), which examines the balancing process between demands on a family (stressors, strains and daily hassles) and its capabilities to cope with its demands (resource capabilities, coping behaviours, and meaning ascribed) the authors explore the process of adjustment among expatriate families. They note that the literature on expatriates and expatriate families cover only some of the demands and capabilities involved, and argue that although expatriate families face more demands than single expatriates, they also have a broader range of capabilities available to them, but the range of resources and coping behaviours are less well researched.
The authors contend that the family is under-represented in studies of expatriation and that there is considerable scope for crossover and spillover effects that are likely to affect the adjustment process. Furthermore, the integration of ideas from family systems theory may bring additional insights into the dynamics of expatriate adjustment. They call for greater theoretical and empirical research on expatriates from the level of the individual to the level of the family unit to gain additional insights into the process of cross-cultural adjustment. This should allow for the better management of, and support for, expatriate assignments that involve families and draws attention to the work-family interface, and the potential for work-family conflict arising from international assignments and global careers.
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Corresponding author
Noreen Heraty can be contacted at: noreen.heraty.ul.ie