Work, Family, and Employee Health

Abstract

Evidence and initiatives suggest that everyday work and family life may shape human health. Unfortunately, this literature remains theoretically underdeveloped and methodologically speculative. This chapter is designed to equip researchers to design and implement effective translational research focused on work and family and employee health. The chapter begins by illustrating the complexity of “health” and prioritizing the value of studying discrete aspects of health. The chapter then identifies three primary ways of thinking about “successful integration of work and family,” and it delineates four discrete hypotheses linking successful integration of work and family to health outcomes. This section includes a review of empirical evidence relevant to each hypothesis. The chapter concludes by identifying a high priority agenda for catapulting work, family, and health research forward.

Work–Family Conflict and Health Among Working Parents: Potential Linkages for Family Science and Social Neuroscience

“…Emerging results from the Work, Family & Health Network are expanding confidence that working adults' experiences of combining work and family are sensitive to deliberate intervention (Moen, Kelly, Tranby, & Huang, ), and that these interventions produce subsequent improvements in discrete disease risk outcomes (Berkman, Buxton, Ertel, & Okechukwu, ; Moen, Fan, & Kelly, ). These emerging results are largely consistent with the wider multidisciplinary literature focused on the health‐related implications of combining paid work and family (see Grzywacz, in press, for a recent review). Contributions of the Work, Family & Health Network notwithstanding, several commentators have lamented the modest number of practical solutions resulting from the voluminous work–family literature (Kossek, Baltes, & Matthews, ), whereas others point to fundamental and methodological shortcomings in this literature (Casper, Eby, Bordeaux, Lockwood, & Lambert, ; Grzywacz, in press).…”

“…These emerging results are largely consistent with the wider multidisciplinary literature focused on the health‐related implications of combining paid work and family (see Grzywacz, in press, for a recent review). Contributions of the Work, Family & Health Network notwithstanding, several commentators have lamented the modest number of practical solutions resulting from the voluminous work–family literature (Kossek, Baltes, & Matthews, ), whereas others point to fundamental and methodological shortcomings in this literature (Casper, Eby, Bordeaux, Lockwood, & Lambert, ; Grzywacz, in press). These critiques can be reasonably summarized in terms of great depth in describing potential linkages between every day and cumulative experiences at the work–family interface and health outcomes.…”

“…Health is a more complex concept that is often under or ambiguously conceptualized in work, family, and health research (Grzywacz, in press), as well as in families and health research (Grzywacz & Ganong, ). A common definition of health comes from the World Health Organization (), which conceives health as a state of complete physical, psychological, and social well‐being that is more than the absence of morbidity.…”

“…Historical and ongoing research has answered several important questions about the role of work–family conflict in shaping the health of working parents. Several recent reviews (Grzywacz, in press) and meta‐analyses (Amstad et al, ; Butts et al, ; Michel et al, ) point to gaps in this literature and high‐priority areas for additional research. In this review we emphasize three of these gaps because they are especially pertinent to this special issue.…”

“…The goal of this paired article is to stimulate an alternative conception and approach to work, family, and health research. To achieve this goal, we refine a recent review of the broader work, family, and health literature (Grzywacz, in press) by emphasizing research on paid work, parenting, and health in order to better isolate fundamental questions and issues that remain unaddressed. The focus on working parents complements Repetti and Robles's () paired cogent discussion of the salient role of parents in shaping children's responses to and recovery from stressors.…”