A Test of Association between Working Hour and Work Family Conflict: A Glimpse on Dhaka’s Female White Collar Professionals

Abstract

As there has been an increasing influx of white collar woman professionals in Dhaka, maintaining work-family balance is becoming more critical day by day. This study particularly attempts to explore the correlation between working hour and work family imbalance. Three FGDs, each with 10 female managers, were conducted, to make a total sample size of 30. Findings report extensive working hours, per se 9-10 hours a day, as a lethal contributor to work family conflict, whereas shorter working hours (average 5-7 hours) have little or no affect. This study is based on Dhaka city and concentrated on private commercial organizations only. So an extended sample with more coverage is suggested.Keywords: Working hour, Work family conflict, Dhaka IntroductionWith the increase in dual-income families and employed single parents, conflict between work and family has reached a crisis (Beauregard, 2006). Rhona and Robert N. Rapoport (1969Rapoport ( , 1976 coined the terms "Dual Career Family" and "Dual Career Couple" (DCC) at that time these have become increasingly significant lifestyles (Greenhaus, 1989;Sekaran, 1983Sekaran, , 1985Sekaran, , 1986.Work and family are the key domains of life to many people (Whitely and England, 1977), and, not surprisingly, work-family conflict (WFC) research has become a major area in organizational research (Parasuraman and Greenhaus, 2002). Work-family stress has been identified as a major problem for working mothers (Aryee et al, 1999, Ng et al, 2002.Most family/work research emphasizes the idea that conflict has an impact on individual's emotional and physical condition, thus causing disadvantages for companies due to absenteeism and diminishing productivity (Cooper and Williams, 1994). Not only conflicts between the two fields might affect productivity, spillover theory (Caligiuri and Cascio, 1998) rather suggests that problems in one domain (e.g. home-life) will affect the other (e.g. performance in the job).There are two types of work-family conflicts (Boyar et al, 2008) A. "work interfering with family" conflict (WIF); and B. "family interfering with work" conflict (FIW) (e.g. Carlson et al., 2000; Frone et al., 1992a Frone et al., , 1996Gutek et al., 1991;Netemeyer et al., 1996). International Journal of Business and Management 28Work-family conflict and family-work conflict are distinct, but conceptually related forms of inter-role conflict (Frone et al., 1992;Netemeyer et al., 1996). Work-family conflict refers to "a form of inter-role conflict in which the general demands of, time devoted to, and strain created by the job interfere with performing family-related responsibilities" and family-work conflict refers to "a form of inter-role conflict in which the general demands of, time devoted to, and strain created by the family interfere with performing work-related responsibilities" (Netemeyer et al., 1996).Both forms of conflict basically result from an individual's attempts to meet an overabundance of demands emanating from the home/family and work domains in whic...

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