| This thesis is about the contemporary issue of work-family role conflict, of serious concern to employees, employers, unions, corporations and commerce, professional groups, and private and governmental organisations alike. Difficulty managing work-family role conflict affects approximately two-thirds of the Canadian workforce, according to nation-wide research. The negative ramifications are widespread and highly significant. Therefore, it is propitious and timely to focus attention on this important research issue.;This thesis is divided into three sections. The first provides an overall description of work-family role conflict in the context of the 1990s. The second section provides an historical overview starting with the pre-industrial, colonial era in Canadian history. Subsequent discussions highlight important historical eras of social change that altered aspects of the work-family interface irreversibly--the Industrial Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, the idyllic suburban lifestyle of the 1950s, and the rise of the women's movement and feminism during the tumultuous 1960s. The final section reviews and critiques three major prevailing bodies of research related to work-family role conflict--the scarcity hypothesis, the expansion hypothesis and the spillover hypothesis. The thesis concludes by proposing a new theoretical model that combines role theory and the three prevailing perspectives with attitude theory, in the hope of providing a new direction for guiding future research on work-family role conflict. The main tenet of the new theoretical model is that consistency between an individual's work-family gender role attitudes and behaviours is the crucial key to reducing the experience of work-family role conflict--that is, individuals benefit the most when they can do what it is they want to do with respect to combining their spouse/parent/worker roles. |
