Balancing Family and Work:
Aims: Examines the amount of time that employed parents spend with their family and the aspect of self-evaluation to the role of parenting.
Methods: Data from the 2008 report by the National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) is used to present an argument regarding the ways organizations can promote work and family balance. The sample is from the NSCW and the eligible respondents that the author uses include people working for pay or people operating a business generating income. The sample groups are aged 18 years and above, with a household telephone line. Total samples of 1,093 participants who are narrowed to 1,009 are used for data collection purposes. The participants involved to collect the data are working and most of them had children aged below 18 years.
Results: Work autonomy, the structure pay, and decreasing the working are the most prominent ways that organizations can use to enhance family-work balance
Discussion/Understandings:
- Work Autonomy: The article shows that work autonomy is an important way that organization can use to manage work and family balance (Speights, Grubbs, & Rubin, 2017). Typically, the article discusses that work autonomy enhances control over work, which is viewed as a vital means of helping parents manage work and family demand.
- The structure of Pay: Moreover, the article demonstrates that employers can use the aspect of the structure of pay to manage work and family time. The article posits that through the pay structure such as low-income makers’ employees has less autonomy compared to the employees working under the salaried structure. When employers’ use specific programs such as hourly working, this create happiness within the employees life, which allows them to structure their schedules in a way that specific time is for work and some amount of time is for the family. Typically, this makes employees to have a freedom in their work-family life, thus making them balance the time for work and family accomplishments.
- Reducing Working Hours: The author reveals that increasing the working hours reduce the time that parents spent with their family, especially the children. As increasing working hours results into lower self-evaluation, the article suggests that employers should help employees balance work-family life by reducing number of hours that parents spend on their work. Besides, when employers reduce the working hours, working life will become flexible, as employees will manage their family life appropriately and carries family responsibilities reasonably.
Limitations:
The limitations of the article are clearly acknowledged.
- First, the article relied on data from other sources, which is an issue when it comes to the data accuracy.
- Furthermore, the article has failed to show the way it analyzed the family life of the research sample used. The sample used for the study is rather homogenous, as the NSCW produces working parents who only knows the values of one country and the majority of the NSCW respondents belong to the Whites race and people with high incomes.
- Lastly, the researcher did not have enough time to investigate on the research problem, which is a limitation as it makes the article use biased sample.
Why is the Article Important?
The article is strongly relevant to both organizations and employees, as they can use it to identify the better ways that can be employed to administer work and family time.
- From a personal perspective, the article is influential, as it describes different strategies that organizations can use to prevent work and family conflict.
- The article shows that an organization should not focus on a single formula to make the life of their employees balanced, as this will affect the life of the employees and the organization itself.
Work-Family Balance:
Aim: Analyses the way different top executives handles the issue of work and family balance.
Method: The semi-structured interview is the technique used in this study, with the participants being selected randomly from European companies’ database with conferring information for top executives in different industries. A sample of 54 top executives is used for the survey, but only 42 respondents who agreed to participate in the survey (Stock, Bauer, & Bieling, 2014). The sample consists of 88% of married men and 90% of them have children. The sample represented organizations with at about 225 to 9810 employees and companies that have an initial database. Through the standard interview, the researcher used open-ended question and each interview lasted for 43 minutes.
Results: Job satisfactions, functioning at work and work-family conflict have impacts on the concept of family and work balance for the top executives.
Discussion:
- Job Satisfaction: The article presents that job satisfaction for many top executive employees is important way of balancing work-family life (Stock, Bauer, & Bieling, 2014). The article quotes that majority of the respondents claim that job satisfaction makes them acquire the feeling of a balanced life. The article proclaims that when employees are dissatisfied with their work, this affects their work and personal life. In the workplace, satisfied employees have less workload and finish their work at the right time, which makes them manage their time with work duties and family duties. Satisfied employees do not work for longer hours, which make them find time to be involved with their family activities.
- Functioning at Work: From the article, it is written that the aspect of functioning at work also relates to the issue of family involvement. When the executives are segmented to work that they can perform efficiently through their abilities, they try to ensure that work does not affect their family life. Work segmentation creates a boundary between family and work life. The article shows that through work segmentation model, executives create time for work and family activities separately. As such, this implies that organizations should value work segmentation, as the model allows employees to live their family and work life differently in which, certain is set time for work and family.
- Work and Family Conflict: This occurs when the role demand between family and work is high than the other one. From the article, it said that when family obstructs with work, the top executive employees experience problems in achieving work-family balance (Stock, Bauer, & Bieling, 2014). From the article, it is suggested that for organizations to ensure the executive employees does not encounter family-work conflict, the role demand for each domain need to be measured so that a boundary is created where the employees will be exempted from the work-family conflict.
Limitation:
- The article has several limitations including the cross-sectional design that the researcher used to design the data. For instance, the article does not talk about issues such as career transitional stages, which can influence work and family domains for top executives. Secondly, the article does not consider the aspect of culture and its impact on the research outcomes.
- The research is based on employees from European companies, which means that the data collected does not consider the implications of cultural differences of the individuals who were identified as executives.
- Finally, the article focuses only on the top executives and fails to consider other employees for data collection. This makes the study look biased, as other employees are a major source of data on the topic of work-family balance.
Important of the Article:
- The article is relevant to other organizations, as it shows them the need of making work life balance by recognizing that employees are needed at home, as much as they are needed in the workplaces.
- The article is also significance to different organizations, as they can use the findings to understand the ways they can promote employees to manage their family and work conflicts.
References
Speights, S. L., Grubbs, S. J., & Rubin, B. A. (2017). Bad jobs, bad parents? How job characteristics relate to time with children and self-evaluations of parents. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 8(1), 20-41. DOI:10.18357/ijcyfs81201716740
Stock, R. M., Bauer, E. M., & Bieling, G. I. (2014). How do top executives handle their work and family life? A taxonomy of top executives’ work–family balance. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(13), 1815-1840. DOI:10.1080/09585192.2013.860383
