What Influences Work-Family Conflict? The Function of Work Support and Working from Home

Abstract

The current study examined how work support resources and working from home influenced forms of work-family conflict (WFC) in employees at a large corporation. Scales measuring employee's general WFC, time-based WFC, and strainbased WFC were used to evaluate the extent to which employees experienced workinduced conflict at home. Two forms of working at home were assessed, days worked at home and extra hours worked at home, and five variables measured the extent of one's support resources: work social support, organizational support, individual consideration from one's manager, idealized influence from one's manager and contingent reward from one's manager. We predicted that days worked at home would be negatively related to the three forms of WFC, while the extra hours worked at home would be positively related. Moreover, we hypothesized that the five support variables would moderate the relationship between extra hours worked at home and the types of WFC. The data supported some of the predictions, and the implications of these findings are discussed.

Predicting Work-Family and Familywork Conflict from Work and Family Domain: A Longitudinal Study

“…Job resources (support from supervisors, co-workers, family-friendly policies and job autonomy) were negatively related to WFC. In other words, job resources could act as buff ers to work-family confl ict; similar to previous fi ndings (e.g: Dinger, Thatcher & Stepina, 2010;Eng, Moore, Grunberg, Greenberg, & Sikora, 2010). Having supportive supervisors and co-workers improve the employee's ability to respond eff ectively to multiple role demands and thereby decrease their perception of WFC.…”

Social Support and Job Satisfaction: Elaborating the Mediating Role of Work-Family Interface

“…Compared with adding extra resources which are costly to implement (e.g., work-family policies), we shed light on the necessity to optimize social support per se. We argue that utilizing support from work domain can reduce work-to-family conflict (Cheuk and Wong 1995;Cohen and Wills 1985;Eng et al 2010). Importantly, we suggest that activating employees' intrinsic motivation to learn from received support for work-to-family facilitation can also strenthen employees' positive evaluation towards organizations.…”

Work-Life Balance for Women in Stem Leadership

“…However, even though men and women seem to differ in their sources of social support, both benefit from this support in reducing work-family imbalance and conflict (McMullan et al, 2018;van Daalen et al, 2006). While some research (Eng, Moore, Grunberg, Greenberg, & Sikora, 2010;Julien, Somerville, & Culp, 2011) has concluded that social support at work reduces WFC and social support at home reduces family-work conflict for women, other research determined that only social support at home reduce family-work conflict (Liao, 2011;van Daalen et al, 2006).…”