Work And Family Life
Today’s employees are working in a highly turbulent and competitive business and working environment. As a result majority of employees work life become so complex. Due to this work life complexity and current world economical condition leads employees to work long hours or do multiple jobs. With the expansion of global business and technology, employees of the global firms need to maintain continues contact with their colleagues or customers who operate within 8 or 10 different time zones away. This means that many employees work within the global firms need to be standby during 24 hours. Moreover cutting edge technology allows employees to perform their work at home or any other place. In fact most of today’s world married employees are part of a dual-career couples This makes increasingly difficult for married employees to find time to fulfil commitment to home, spouse, children, parents and friends. Therefore, due to these reasons work life tent to be interfere with family life. This is called work family conflict.
Since this work family conflict leads to create negative consequences such as increased absenteeism, increased turnover, diminishing performances, etc; it is important to have a good understanding about this work family conflict in organisational context. Therefore in today’s organisations, work place environment is being modified to minimise work family conflict and to establish a balance between work and family life. This mostly include offering flexible work schedule, relocated assistance, adoption assistance, provide training for managers to assist employees in dealing work/family conflicts, focus on employees actual performance rather “face time”, casual day programme, etc. Conduct these types of programmes within the organisations is important since its tent to reduce mainly work/family conflicts, job dissatisfaction, and stress related problems. But on the other hand it may be difficult to assess the direct positive impacts of these programmes have on work performances of the employees.
Work and Family Life- reciprocal effects article is mainly focus on foresaid work/family conflict. All arguments of this article are base on several research findings done by the Australian Institute of Family Studies and other relative studies. According to article it is been proved that 25 and 40 percent of employees indicate that their jobs interferes with family life to some extent. Furthermore base on the research done by Australian Institute of Family Studies found that 28% of women and 40% of men believe that work life interferes with home life. At the same manner 35% women and 28% of men believe that their partners work life interferes with home life. But out of all respondents only few men and women believe that the family life interfere with their work life.
This result of the survey shows the impact of family life to the employees working life. These factors increase the real need of work/family life balancing in order to gain employees performances. Most of the middle age employees(30-49) believe that work life interfere with family life with the complexity of work and family life that they are experiencing at that age such as child care, high peek career demand, etc.
Courses for work/family conflicts
When analysing work/family conflict it can be identify few major factors associated with it. One factor is employee’s job situation. As a result of job related factors such as downsizing, additional task allocation, challenging assignments, and strategies of participation, job insecurity and frequent relocations have brought an increased workload which stimulates tension and course to create a true conflict between employees work and family life. Another main factor highlighted in this article is employees working hours. According to the research findings, 23 percent of women and 66 percent of men were working more than 41 hours per week. This hour of work is tent to affect the degree of impact to create work/family conflict. Research finding indicate that 60 percent of men and women are preferred to work fewer hours than they currently work as a result of work interfere with home life.
In fact job position of the organisation also determine the level of work interfere with family life. Employees in higher job positions tend to work longer hours, under pressure with higher responsibilities and job tasks. This leads to create high stress to the employees. This stress leads to negative sequences such as unsatisfactory behaviours at job: delays, absenteeism, lack of motivation and reduced level of performance.
On the family life, presence of children’s can also tend to complex this work/family conflict and will act as obstacle for work family balancing process. One factor which tend to determine the level of work interfere with family life is age levels of children’s of married employees. This varies for fathers and mothers. According to this article, youngest children’s have a great impact to the level of work/family conflict of mothers where as the younger children’s have greater impact for fathers in creating conflict between work and family. Partners work schedule and conditions have greater impact in determining level of work/family conflict as a result of increasing level of dual careers of families. Therefore this leads to determine the happiness of family life bas on the job situations experiencing by the employees.
According to the research findings; out of fulltime working couples with children under 18, 47 percent fathers and 41 percent of mothers strongly believe that their work life is interfere with family life. Moreover mothers who work for part time is less likely to feel that their work life tend to interfere with family life since they have much more time in balancing work and family life. In fact more men than women tend to believe that their work life interferes with family life as a result of working long hours. On the other hand, there is high tendency to exist high work/family life for lone mothers than couple families since all responsibilities fall on the one parent.
When considering courses for work/family conflict many researches and studies argue that many employees tend to believe, work life more interfere with family life rather than family life interfere with work life. Moreover many studies highlighted that employees are better in managing potential disruptions occur from family life into work rather than managing work disruptions affect to family life. According to the research findings (Australian family life course study); only few employees were believe that family life interfere with work life. (Out of full time employees, 11 percent men and 13 percent women and 0 percent of part-time working women) Therefore it can be noted that work life begin to interfere for family life, when job responsibilities and problems begin to interfere in accomplishing family related obligations.
Outcomes of work/family conflict
As foresaid, it can be distinguish two types of work-family conflict: work interferes with family life and family interfere with work life. Therefore these two types of conflict are adverse consequences for several outcomes for employees.
Stress
Stress can be identifying as one of main outcome of work-family life conflict. Most of the employees tend to suffer from this stress as a result of failing to have a better balance between family and work life. Therefore we can find that there is high correlation between work/family conflicts with employee stress. Most of the researches conduct various types of researches to identify this relationship. Many authors define Stress as an interaction between the factors that leads to stress (stressors) and level of individual response towards it (strain). http://icssea.ppiukm.org/paper/PSI-97.pdf Lot of employees are subjected to have an anxiety, low work motivation, low job satisfaction, pressure and burnout as a result of high work responsibilities, long working hours, job insecurity, high competition, unmet family obligations, etc. Since all foresaid factors are the reasons for work family conflict most researchers has been identify that the work/family conflict as a main source to have stress and pressure. According to the Australian Family Course study, 43% percent men and 53% percent women often felt tired and run down their job tasks. From this research findings researches have been identify a positive relationship with work interfering with work and stress which influence employee’s well being. (Case)
Job dissatisfaction
Job dissatisfaction is associated with the degree of employees feeling towards their job. Negative feelings towards the job can leads to create low level of job satisfaction and this course to have high employee turnover, low performance, high absenteeism, etc. In order to identify the relationship between work/family conflict and job dissatisfaction, several researches had been done. These research findings always tend to highlight a negative relationship between work/family conflict and job satisfaction. As foresaid, stress, anxiety and high pressure are some of main outcome of work/family conflict. Therefore due to all these factors, leads to create low level of job satisfaction. According to the model proposed by Kopelman (1983), explain the relationship between factors like work conflict, family conflict, job satisfaction, family satisfaction and life satisfaction. This model argue that the factors such as work conflict and family conflict leads to create inter role conflict by employees and this inter role conflict, influence employees job and work satisfaction. Ultimately this both job and work satisfaction affect to life satisfaction. http://psasir.upm.edu.my/3101/1/Associations_of_Work-Family_Conflict,_Job_Satisfaction,_Family_Satisfaction.pdf
This level of satisfaction is a crucial factor for any organisation, since it’s highly connected with employee turnover, absenteeism, performance level and productivity of the organisation. Therefore it is extremely important to assist employees o maintain a well balance work and family life.
According to the research conduct by Department of Social Psychology and Methodology of Behaviour Sciences, University of Granada, Spain; has been identify that the relationship between work/family life and general job satisfaction is stronger in women than men. Moreover it found that general role of women in a family has a significant moderate effect on the association between work/family conflict and general job satisfaction of women.
http://www.academicjournals.org/ajbm/PDF/pdf2010/4July/Calvo-Salguero%20et%20al.pdf
