Formal and Informal Supports for Managing Work and Family

Abstract

Many working adults manage joint work and family responsibilities and turn to supports offered at work and in the home to help manage these roles successfully. We review the current evidence on supports for improving work–life outcomes, including informal support from people at work and at home as well as formal organizational and national policies. Informal support is consistently moderately associated with better work–family experiences. Despite popular emphasis on formal policies, evidence for their effectiveness is relatively weak. We propose an agentic perspective to drive future understanding of how and when supports may be used to improve work–family management.

Family-Friendly Policy and Work-Family Conflict Mitigation: The Role of Work-Family Boundary Negotiation

“…The recent study depicted that individuals who experience greater workfamily conflict when work and home boundaries are violated as the boundary violations hinder one from meeting the work goal and also resulted in greater negative effect (Hunter et al, 2017). Other studies have shown the utilization of the policy could result in greater expectation from role senders (i.e., family members) on a focal person to perform more family tasks such as carrying out household work and taking care of children and the elderly (Allen et al, 2013;French & Shockley, 2020;Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985;Tausig & Fenwick, 2001). Despite past research reported that familyfriendly policy such as flexitime could help to release work-family conflict (Shockley & Allen, 2010), however, telework policy use that involving high integration of work-family boundaries has not been seen as a remedy for mitigating the work-family conflict in Kossek et al (2006) and Abendroth and Reimann (2018) studies.…”

“…Kailasapathy and Metz's (2012) study revealed that subordinates are more likely than supervisors to initiate negotiation about the work-family life arrangements which involve exchange relationships at work. Self-regulation is needed when access to family-friendly policy to juggle work and family role responsibilities (French & Shockley, 2020). Individuals engage in negotiation to collaborate with their role partners at workplace, supervisor and coworkers for seeking integrative solutions, flexible work arrangements, coordinate work and work schedule leave arrangements and the use of work-family benefits, and negotiation with a spouse or other family members at home to achieve their desired work and family life arrangements (Kirby & Krone, 2002;Robertson et al, 2019;Ter Hoeven et al, 2017).…”

“…Owing to the growing of dual-earner family and the virtue workplace resulted from the digital technology work environment, organization management design familyfriendly policy to favor the employees. Firms offer work schedule flexibility (i.e., flextime, part-time, flexible shift arrangement, and compressed workweek), paid leave (i.e., paid parental leave, maternity leave, and childcare leave), childcare and elderly care services and subsidies, and work from home to ease employees' work-family life arrangements (French & Shockley, 2020;Kim & Parish, 2020;Oishi et al, 2015;Poelmans & Sahibzada, 2004;Shockley & Allen, 2010).…”

“…The use of the policy requires one to make the request but the request may not necessarily be fulfilled in the first place (Berg et al, 2013;Hammer et al, 2009). The development and the implementation of family-friendly policies per se found ineffective owing to its inconsistency in remedying the work-family conflict experienced in the literature (Allen et al, 2013;Beutell & O'Hare, 2018;French & Shockley, 2020). Availability and accessibility of family-friendly policies are not necessarily could help individuals to reduce workfamily conflict (Kim & Parish, 2020).…”

“…Individuals may not be beneficial from the policies as not all have the opportunity to access those policies (Kim & Parish, 2020). Even though individuals manage to access the flexibility policy, however, the access of the flexibility policy may rather intensing than easing the work-family conflict as their spouse or family members expect them to devote more time for the family demand (French & Shockley, 2020;Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985;Tausig & Fenwick, 2001). Although individuals could work at home and carry out their family life responsibilities under flexibility policy, the work-family conflict experience remains as they still carry equal or excessive workload as they work at the workplace (Abendroth & Reimann, 2018;Brannen, 2005).…”