Organizational Initiatives for Promoting Employee Work-Life Reconciliation Over the Life Course. A Systematic Review of Intervention Studies

Abstract

This review aimed to explore the initiatives, interventions, and experiments implemented by employing organizations and designed to support the work-life reconciliation at workplaces

Longitudinal latent profiles of work–family balance: Examination of antecedents and outcomes.

“…Providing such organizational family supportive practices could benefit employees’ quality of life by helping them achieve WFB (Goñi-Legaz & Ollo-López, 2016), as well as benefit their employers by improving employees’ organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Bae & Yang, 2017), as well as reducing turnover rates (Caillier, 2016). Such policies should have tangible effects on employees and must be perceived by them as signaling a family friendly climate at work, rather than being implied automatically by official family friendly policies (Amstad et al, 2011; for a review, see Ropponen, Känsälä, Rantanen, & Toppinen-Tanner, 2016).…”

Can organisational work–life policies improve work–life interaction? A scoping review

“…However, these three reviews are 12, 10, and 7 years old respectively, and did not specifically address the impact of organisational work-life policies on work-life interaction. More recently, Ropponen, Känsälä, Rantanen, and Toppinen-Tanner (2016) conducted a systematic review of organisational interventions, initiatives, or experiments at either the organisational or individual level that aimed to promote work-life reconciliation.…”

Humanization, Rationalization or Subjectification of Work? Employee-Oriented Flexibility Between I-Deals and Ideology in the Neoliberal Era

“…Tensions and trade-offs between organizational and individual interests in workplace flexibility are most commonly studied with regard to temporal aspects, for instance by contrasting capacity-oriented versus autonomy-oriented working time systems or aspects thereof (e.g., Kattenbach, Demerouti, & Nachreiner, 2010;Lott, 2018). Overall, there is a rich and compelling literature firmly establishing that temporal flexibility is associated with positive outcomes for employees only if (and only to the extent that) the resulting variabilities in the duration, distribution, and scheduling of daily, weekly, and monthly working times are under autonomous control of the respective employees, which, conversely, means limited employer authority over determining the timing of labor input (e.g., Cañibano, 2019;Ropponen, Känsälä, Rantanen, & Toppinen-Tanner, 2016). In contrast, the capacity-oriented scheduling of work inevitably manifests in time-related stressors and negative implications for employees.…”

“…Examples of HR practices introducing variability in job features are part-time work, working time accounts, development or training budgets, self-organizing teams, individual goal setting, and cafeteria benefit plans. Traditionally, research on organizational and work design has focused on such broad-based top-down planned and implemented interventions, for instance, with regard to job enrichment or family-friendly work arrangements (e.g., Daniels et al, 2017;Knijn & Smit, 2009;Ropponen et al, 2016). The focus of more recent research interest are workplace changes that are initiated and enacted "bottom-up" by employees through discretionary proactive (and deviant) behavior (e.g., Grant & Ashford, 2008;Parker et al, 2017).…”