How Employees Balance Their Work And Family

The study of work-family interface, which rises in the 1960s and 1970s, has been one of a focus of the OB. After nearly half a century of exploration, this field has accumulated rich theoretical and empirical achievements, particularly about work-family conflict. However, the study of work-family facilitation has just been concerned in recent years, with little theoretical or empirical achievements. At present, the focus of research in this field concerns about how explore effective ways to help employees balance their work and family lives. This study concerns the importance of organization in helping employees balance their work and family lives, trying to reveal the impact of organization's informal work-family support on work-family conflict, work-family enrichment and some important OB variables, such as work satisfaction and turnover intention. To achieve this goal, this study was composed of following four specific researches:Research one, strictly following the test development processes, we developed the organization's informal work-family support scale and the work-family enrichment scale, which reflect our China's actuality. The informal work-family support of organization is composed by time requirements, staff concerns, supervisors support and colleagues support. And, the work-family enrichment includes work-family enrichment and family-work enrichment, each including the instrumental and psychological components. Under empirical test, these two questionnaires are both good reliable and effective, and can be used as ideal measuring tools.Research two, questionnaire research. In this research, organizations' informal work-family support scale and work-family enrichment scale, also work-family conflict questionnaire, work satisfaction scale and turnover intention scale were used. 268 employees took part in this research. Multiple stepwise regression analysis result showed that, time requirements, staff concerns and supervisor support can significantly anticipate the level of work-family conflict. However, only supervisor support and colleague support can significantly anticipate the level of work-family enrichment. Besides, supervisor support and colleague support can also significantly anticipate work-satisfaction. The significant anticipation of turnover intention is supervisor support.Research three tested the role of organizations' informal support which was revealed in research two, through experimental method. A 2×2×2 completely randomized design was employed, and 8 scenarios which consisted of the information on high/low time requirements, high/low staff concerns, high/low supervisor's support and high/low colleague's support were used as research materials to analyze the influence of organization's informal work-family support on work-family conflict, work-family enrichment, work satisfaction and turnover intention. The result showed that, the influences of all the four aspects on all the four dependent variables are significant.Comprehensive analysis the results of research two and three, we tested a mediation model, by reanalyzing the data collected by research two. The results showed that, time requirements and staff concerns can impact turnover intention, through the mediation of work-family conflict. On the other hand, supervisor support and colleague support have impaction on work satisfaction, through the mediation of work-family enrichment, and last influence turnover intention.Finally, theoretical and practical value of this paper was discussed, and the limitations of this research and research orientation were provided.