Publications

This chapter, with its focus on quality of work life, briefly reviews the history of work–family research (note that this term from here on is used generically to represent both workers with traditional and nontraditional families, as well as representing work–nonwork aspects of our lives more broadly), including work and leisure, demographic and workplace changes, and public policy developments in the United States. We discuss the research on work–family conflict and work–family enrichment, including antecedents, outcomes, and crossover effects extending to the family. This leads to a more recent discussion of work, family, and the community, followed by issues of work engagement and recovery stemming from work by our European colleagues. Implications of our current state of knowledge about work–life and quality of work–life issues for practicing managers and employing organizations are discussed throughout along with suggestions for future research in the field, including a call for more research on low-wage workers, health, cross-cultural issues, and efforts to push public policy in the direction of more support for workers and their families. We end the chapter with a proposed integrative systems model of the work–family interface that considers socioeconomic, legal, political, community, organizational, and family contextual factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)

This article examines perspectives on employer work—life initiatives as potential organizational change phenomena. Work—life initiatives address two main organizational challenges: structural (flexible job design, human resource policies) and cultural (supportive supervisors, climate) factors. While work—life initiatives serve a purpose in highlighting the need for organizational adaptation to changing relationships between work, family, and personal life, we argue they usually are marginalized rather than mainstreamed into organizational systems. We note mixed consequences of work—life initiatives for individuals and organizations. While they may enable employees to manage work and caregiving, they can increase work intensification and perpetuate stereotypes of ideal workers. In order to advance the field, organizations and scholars need to frame both structural and cultural work—life changes as part of the core employment systems to enhance organizational effectiveness and not just as strategies to support disadvantaged, non-ideal workers. We conclude with an overview of the articles in this special issue.

This paper presents empirical research analyzing the relationship between work–family climate (operationalized in terms of three work–family climate sub-scales), organizational leadership (i.e., senior manager) characteristics, organizational commitment and turnover intent among 526 employees from 37 different hotels across the US. Using multilevel modeling, we found significant associations between work–family climate, and both organizational commitment and turnover intent, both within and between hotels. Findings underscored the importance of managerial support for employee work–family balance, the relevance of senior managers’ own work–family circumstances in relation to employees’ work outcomes, and the existence of possible contagion effects of leaders in relation to work–family climate.

Due to growing work-family demands, supervisors need to effectively exhibit family supportive supervisor behaviors (FSSB). Drawing on social support theory and using data from two samples of lower wage workers, the authors develop and validate a measure of FSSB, defined as behaviors exhibited by supervisors that are supportive of families. FSSB is conceptualized as a multidimensional superordinate construct with four subordinate dimensions: emotional support, instrumental support, role modeling behaviors, and creative work-family management. Results from multilevel confirmatory factor analyses and multilevel regression analyses provide evidence of construct, criterion-related, and incremental validity. The authors found FSSB to be significantly related to work-family conflict, work-family positive spillover, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions over and above measures of general supervisor support.

Simple, inexpensive programs that teach managers to be more supportive of their direct reports' work/life issues can generate big returns in employee health and satisfaction, according to a multiyear study of hundreds of frontline workers and dozens of supervisors.

Scholars have not fully theorized the multifaceted, interdependent dimensions within the work-family ‘black box’. Taking an ecology of the life course approach, we theorize common work-family and adequacy constructs as capturing different components of employees' cognitive appraisals of fit between their demands and resources at the interface between home and work. Employees' appraisals of their work-family linkages and of their relative resource adequacy are not made independently but, rather, co-occur as identifiable constellations of fit. The life course approach hypothesizes that shifts in objective demands/resources at work and at home over the life course result in employees experiencing cycles of control, that is, corresponding shifts in their cognitive assessments of fit. We further theorize patterned appraisals of fit are key mediators between objective work-family conditions and employees' health, well-being and strategic adaptations. As a case example, we examine whether employees' assessments on 10 dimensions cluster together as patterned fit constellations, using data from a middle-class sample of 753 employees working at Best Buy's corporate headquarters. We find no single linear construct of fit that captures the complexity within the work-family black box. Instead, respondents experience six distinctive constellations of fit: one optimal; two poor; and three moderate fit constellations.