Making Work and Family Work

From hard choices to smart choices

Jeffrey H. Greenhaus, Gary N. Powell

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317702726
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Personal Development
• Categoría: Careers

Making Work and Family Work investigates the difficult choices that contemporary employees must face when juggling work and family with a view to identifying the smart choices that all parties involved—society, employers, employees and families—should make to promote greater work–life balance.

Leading scholars Jeffrey Greenhaus and Gary Powell begin by identifying the factors that work against an employee's ability to be effective and satisfied in their work and family roles. From there, they examine a variety of factors that impact the decision-making process that employees and their families can use to enhance employees' feelings of work-family balance and families' well-being.

Covering a comprehensive set of topics and perspectives, this fascinating book will appeal to upper-level students of human resource management, organizational behavior, industrial/organizational psychology, sociology, and economics, as well as to thoughtful and engaged professionals.

1
THE CHALLENGE

Making Work and Family Work

At one time, it seemed that individuals’ decisions about how to allocate their time, energy, and psychological investment in work and family roles were straightforward: Men were expected to place primary focus on their work role by being “breadwinners,” and women were expected to place primary focus on their family role by being “homemakers.” These prescriptions for male and female behavior made decision-making fairly simple, and relatively few men or women felt that they had any real choice about what to emphasize in life. Instead, what people should emphasize was dictated by social norms about appropriate behavior for women vis-à-vis men that were consistent across societies, and all they needed to do was go along.

This view of what came to be called “traditional” gender roles, or beliefs about the behaviors that are appropriate for members of each sex,¹ was conveyed (one could say perpetuated) by early television sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best; it also was stressed in early books on the topic such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.² Some observers have argued that traditional gender roles still prevail in societal norms and practices and have never gone away.³ However, although gender roles have had a powerful influence on many individuals’ behavior over time, decision-making about what to emphasize in one’s life in today’s era is not as simple as the above paragraph suggests. In this book, we explain why it has become more difficult for people to, as we put it, “make work and family work,” and we offer recommendations for what kinds of actions by all parties involved are necessary to help people to achieve this goal.

What Is the Problem?

Making work and family work, in our view, means combining work and family responsibilities in a way that enables people to achieve a reasonable balance between these two important spheres of life and enhance their family’s well-being. Unfortunately, contemporary employees often find it challenging to achieve these goals. Frequently they face hard, even agonizing choices about which facet of their life—work or family—takes precedence in a particular situation.⁴ For example, they may face a choice about working extra hours to meet a team deadline on an important project or attending their child’s soccer game (or music recital, karate tournament, school play, and so on). This kind of situation is not made up for the sake of having a useful example on which to hang our argument; instead, it’s very real. One of the authors (Powell) has a vivid memory of such an incident that occurred during his adolescence:

My close cousin John was graduating from high school in a daytime ceremony, and, of course, my Uncle Al wanted to go to the ceremony. However, Uncle Al was told by his employer that he could not attend his son’s graduation ceremony because of work requirements. He was ready to adjust his work schedule to meet all work requirements in advance, and no work project or activity would have been delayed by his attending the graduation ceremony. However, his request to do so was summarily dismissed. Uncle Al still could have chosen to attend the ceremony, but to make this choice would have jeopardized his job standing. As a result, he missed the graduation and was very distraught about it. I believed, as a graduating high school senior myself, that the bind in which my uncle was placed was WRONG, and I never forgot it.

Decision situations such as Uncle Al’s dilemma persist to this day, especially in organizations that demand long work hours and provide little flexibility, although the choice to work or to spend time with the family often takes a different form because of advances in communication technology. Today, people often deal with conflicting demands by trying to meet all of their role requirements simultaneously. A quick glimpse of the bleachers at a soccer game (or the audience at a music recital) is likely to reveal many parents continually checking their smartphones and responding to messages about a work project while glancing up from time to time to follow their child on the field or the stage. Taken to the extreme, repeated attempts to “do it all” at the same time—be good employees and attentive family members—often leave people feeling stressed and less than fully satisfied or effective in either of these roles.

In addition to the hard choices faced by employees, families are facing increasing difficulties in dealing with the stresses resulting from both partners juggling work and family roles and in making decisions about who does what at work and home, which result in a high level of cumulative family stress. Employers are finding it increasingly difficult to attract and retain valued employees, who are more likely to make work decisions based on family considerations (e.g. to reject offers of relocation or promotion for family reasons) than ever before. Further, societies are facing growing demands for family-supportive legislation, and the overall happiness of societies is being affected by the increasing difficulty that societal members are facing in juggling work and family responsibilities.

The purpose of this book is to identify what we call “smart choices” that need to be made by all parties involved—societies, employers, employees, and families—to alleviate the burden of the hard choices that employees and their families so often face. Before we proceed, let’s address some basic questions about our approach in this book.

1. Why are we focusing on work and family when there are many other roles or activities that may be important to people? People may be involved in activities pertaining to their community, friendships, religion, political beliefs, or continued pursuit of education, as well as their own personal interests and hobbies. Nevertheless, we adopt a work–family focus in the book because work and family are the two roles in many people’s lives in which they have the greatest amount of involvement and investment and with which they identify the most. Further, much of the scholarship on which we draw has examined concepts such as work–family balance, conflict, and enrichment.⁵ Although such phenomena may be more broadly characterized as “work–life” balance, conflict, and enrichment respectively, we focus primarily in this book on phenomena related to the work–family interface for the reasons stated above. Nonetheless, in subsequent chapters, we discuss the implications of our conclusions for life outside of work and family, and we believe that most actions that societies and organizations take to become more “family-friendly” also make them more “life-friendly.”

2. Why is it desirable for all parties involved to try to enhance employees’ work–family balance and families’ well-being? Attaining work–family balance is important to people. When employees are more effective in and satisfied with their work and family roles commensurate with their values and avoid excessive work–family stress, they experience greater psychological and physical well-being and a higher quality of life, and can become more valuable employees and more involved family members, with the end result being that organizations are more productive and societies exhibit a greater level of well-being.⁶ In addition, when family well-being is enhanced, positive synergies between the social systems of family and work may result in workplace growth; in other words, if the family thrives, the workplace experiences of its employed members may thrive as well.⁷ These goals of decision-making are examined in detail in Chapter 2.

3. What do we mean by “hard choices” and “smart choices,” which are key terms in the book? We regard a hard choice as the selection of a course of action by employees or families that has little chance of helping employees to become more effective and satisfied in their work and family lives—little chance of enhancing their work–family balance—or enhancing family well-being because none of the possible courses of action they have identified is likely to meet either goal. In contrast, a smart choice is the selection of a course of action that has a strong likelihood of helping employees to be effective and satisfied in different parts of their lives, thereby to experience more work–family balance, and families to achieve greater well-being. Smart choices can be made not only by employees and families to enhance employees’ effectiveness and balance and families’ well-being, but also can be made by societies and organizations to help their citizens and employees enhance their effectiveness and balance, and to promote their families’ well-being. In fact, a central argument in this book is that if societies make smart choices, organizations will be encouraged or have greater latitude to make smart choices as well; and if societies and organizations make smart choices, employees and families will not have to make as many hard choices that restrict their opportunity to enhance the employee’s work–family balance or the family’s well-being. In short, there will be a trend “from hard choices to smart choices” regarding work and family.

As we elaborate in Chapters 5 and 6, when an employee or a family makes a decision designed to benefit work and family, a favorable outcome is not guaranteed. Sometimes, decision-making biases are responsible for a less than optimal outcome. For example, we may fail to consider or prematurely dismiss a potentially viable alternative such as starting our own business because it seems overwhelming or is outside the realm of our day-to-day experience. In other cases, we may misjudge or ignore the consequences of a course of action as, for example, falsely believing that a particular job will relieve certain stresses only to discover that the unanticipated pressures of the new job actually increase the amount of stress we experience.

However, in addition to situations in which decision-making biases inhibit or misdirect needed action, there are situations in which employees or families correctly believe that no course of action is likely to enhance the well-being of their work or family lives. We refer to these decisions as hard choices because none of the options seems likely to meet employee or family needs. To illustrate, consider the case of Tom:

Tom is an assistant plant manager for a utility company. His long and irregular work hours severely limit his opportunity to spend sufficient time with his spouse and children, and he sees no way out of the situation. Tom rejects the option of negotiating with his boss for more flexible work hours for fear of being labeled as uncommitted to his job in an unsupportive corporate culture that prioritizes employees’ work duties ahead of their family lives. He also rejects the option of quitting because he is convinced that his lack of a college degree would prevent him from finding equivalent employment with a more family-supportive employer and he is unwilling to risk his pension for which he is not yet vested. Further, he rejects the option of seeking a non-supervisory position with the company because he can’t afford to take a cut in pay with two young children, another on the way, and a spouse who wants to remain at home while the children are young. Besides, if he did seek a downward move, Tom is convinced that his company would never provide another opportunity for him to be promoted when his children are older. In short, Tom feels trapped.

Tom faces a hard choice because no alternative course of action that he has identified seems capable of bringing relief to him and his family. It is not an impossible choice. For example, he could attempt to seek support and flexibility from his boss, complete his college degree online to become more competitive in the workplace, or take two part-time positions that would allow him to watch the children while his wife works part-time. Thus, Tom has other options available to him, but each is fraught with uncertainty and has its own risk, which is what makes it a hard choice. In this case, he does not know whether approaching his boss would destroy their already tenuous relationship, pursuing a college degree would take more time away from his family and drain his energy further, or he and his wife would be able to support their family on three part-time jobs.

We contrast hard choices with smart choices, or decisions that have a reasonably good chance to produce favorable outcomes for employees and their families. Although many employees and families will occasionally have to make hard choices, we believe that hard choices often exist because work–family decisions made by societies and work organizations constrain the options available to employees and families. Tom’s choices are so hard because his employer is inflexible, his manager is unsupportive, and his pension is not transferable to another organization.

What Are the Origins of the Problem?

Thus, employees and their families can have a difficult time making work and family work because they frequently face hard choices. Why they face so many hard choices in managing their work and family lives resides in a convergence of present-day factors that we briefly describe, with greater detail to come in the chapters that follow.

1. Societies’ laws and norms often do not support their citizens’ effective involvement in both work and family roles. As discussed in C...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword by Phyllis Moen
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Challenge: Making Work and Family Work
• 2 Work–Family Decision-Making
• 3 Societal Work–Family Decisions
• 4 Organizational Work–Family Decisions
• 5 Employee Work–Family Decisions
• 6 Family Work–Family Decisions
• 7 Making Work and Family Work: Moving from Here to There
• Name Index
• Subject Index