Author
- ANJNI ANAND
- VEENA VOHRA
- MANJARI SRIVASTAVA
- SUMI JHA
Abstract
This study has been undertaken to understand the impact of Work-family Conflict on team performance. While abundant literature focuses on individual level outcomes, team level outcomes have not been studied in the context of Work-family conflict. This study attempts to address this gap by exploring how team dynamics change and are impacted in the presence of Work-family Conflict. Additionally, the impact of social support at work and work role overload as antecedent variables on Work-family Conflict is also examined. Perceptions of social support vary from culture to culture and impact balancing work and family roles, making social support at work an important variable to consider in this study. Similarly, work role overload was studied due to the high-pressure nature of work in the corporate world today. At the level of team outcomes, affective outcomes were considered for this study, namely Cohesiveness, Affective Commitment and Intention to leave. In order to better understand the relation between work-family conflict and team level outcomes, job satisfaction has been included as a mediator variable. It was found that social support at work and role overload, both contributed significantly to work-family conflict. Findings indicated that work-family conflict significantly impacted Cohesiveness and Affective commitment while job satisfaction partially mediated the relation between work-family conflict and these two team-level outcomes. However, no significant relation or mediation could be observed with respect to Intention to leave. The limitations of this study and scope for further research are also discussed.
Introduction
Work-family conflict, a type of inter-role conflict, has been an area of interest for researchers globally, owing to the changing nature of jobs and roles in a high-pressure-high-performance context existing worldwide in corporations. Work-family conflict has been defined as a form of inter-role conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect, that is, participation in work (family) role is made more difficult by virtue of participation in family (work) role (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985). The reason behind an increasing interest in this area is that work-family conflict impacts the two most important domains of an individual’s life – work domain and family domain. The demands of the two domains are often incompatible and compete for an individual’s time and attention. This may cause an imbalance in either one or both the domains. Changes in the demographic composition of workforce have occurred with an increasing number of women participating in, and competing with men at the workplace. Additionally, a rise in dual-earner couples has led to the severe problem of managing and balancing the demands of two conflicting and significant domains.
Research in the field of work-family conflict has brought forth the fact that this inter-role conflict can have severe repercussions in the form of work-related problems, family-related problems and can impact an individual’s general well-being too. In their meta-analysis, Allen et al (2000) have classified work-related outcomes as: job satisfaction, organisational commitment, intention to leave, absenteeism, job performance, career satisfaction, career success. Non-work related outcomes were categorised as: life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, family satisfaction, family performance and leisure satisfaction. Stress- related outcomes were: general psychological strain, somatic symptoms, depression, substance abuse, burnout, work-related stress and family-related stress. Internationally too, organisations as well as governments of many nations are realising the importance of non-work life and the impact of work-family conflict on the personal and professional lives of individuals. Many nations have introduced policies on reduced work hours and many organisations too have limited the access to employees after work hours. In times of increased connectivity through mobiles and internet, an employee is actually never away from his job.
Due to such severe consequences of work-family conflict, researchers have studied the amount of work-family conflict experienced by people working in different professions and the causes and consequences of the conflict. The current study focuses on teams working in the corporate sector in India, to understand the impact of factors present in the work domain on the amount of work-family conflict experienced by them, and the consequences of the conflict especially on employees working in teams.