Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? What Happens When Business Professionals Confront Life Choices

Citation

Pajo, K. (2001), "Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? What Happens When Business Professionals Confront Life Choices", Women in Management Review, Vol. 16 No. 7, pp. 357-359. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2001.16.7.357.1

I am a parent in a dual‐income family and I have first‐hand knowledge of the tensions between work and family and have struggled to balance the competing demands of both. Therefore, it was with a huge degree of anticipation that I settled down to read Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? A glance at the dust jacket had assured me that the book offered “a fresh new lens for viewing the real struggles that business professionals face in their daily battle to find ways of ‘getting a life’ and ‘having it all’....”.

The authors contend that their book differs in its scope and purpose from other recent publications on work and family. They point to such distinctive features as their emphasis on multiple perspectives (including that of organisations, individuals, and other stakeholders such as children), their concentration on cross‐domain effects, and the balanced approach they adopt that gives equal weight to the experiences of both men and women. However, perhaps most importantly they distinguish their book by its emphasis on empirical research. More specifically, the model of work‐family linkages they develop and the conclusions they present are based on their analysis of data from a large survey of more than 800 business professionals. As a researcher with empiricist leanings this struck a chord and so, eager to know more, I began to read.

The book is organised into nine chapters plus appendices, additional tables, notes and references. Chapter one sets the scene for the rest of the book. In this chapter, Friedman and Greenhaus provide an overview of the main themes arising out of their investigation, briefly canvas some of the important gender differences that have emerged in previous research, and conclude with a short discussion on the changing nature of careers.

In chapter two, “Choosing work or family… or both?”, Friedman and Greenhaus begin to describe the results from their own study. They argue that individuals can be categorised according to their life role priorities. More specifically, they propose four distinct groups of life role priorities these being career, family, career and family, and self/society. They argue that individuals with a specific life role priority are likely to spend their time and invest their emotions in particular ways. For example, those in the career group are likely to work longer hours, be more psychologically involved in their careers, spend less time on household activities and so forth. In contrast those in the family group spend more time on household activities, are more psychologically involved in their families, less likely to aspire to senior management positions etc. They also explore how gender and parental status impacts on a number of career and family outcomes. In particular, they focus on the tradeoffs made by those attempting to balance the conflicting demands of work and family. They conclude that it is difficult to be highly involved in both career and family at the same time, but nevertheless some individuals are capable of doing so. Unsurprisingly they also report that women experience a greater number of constraints and must make more tradeoffs than do men.

The next five chapters go on to explore specific findings from the survey. Chapter three considers how family impacts on careers. Here the authors focus their discussion around the question of whether family responsibilities restrict or enhance career success. They conclude that, in general, there is a family bonus for men and a family penalty incurred for women. In chapter four Friedman and Greenhaus turn things around and examine how work and careers affect family. They find that certain career and work factors such as authority, organisational commitment, and optimistic career prospects positively influence our satisfaction with family and personal lives. They also suggest that the problem of overwork and not having enough time to do it all may have been overstated. They believe that while time constraints are a significant factor, it is our psychological efforts to balance our different life roles that is most important in the long run.

In chapter five, the authors examine how the work experiences of parents influence their capacity to care for their children. They report that “children of career focussed parents are more likely to experience behaviour problems, and do less well in school, than are those whose parents are focused on family” (p. 70). In terms of gender differences they found that fathers who are psychologically involved in their careers are less available to their children and their children are more likely to experience behaviour problems. Conversely, when mothers are psychologically involved in their careers this seems to benefit the children. Friedman and Greenhaus suggest that this may be due to enhanced self‐esteem amongst such women.

The authors then turn their attention to strategies that help reduce the likelihood, and severity of, work‐family conflict. Chapter six considers the role of partner support and Friedman and Greenhaus conclude that it is most likely to be beneficial when it is provided before work‐family conflicts have intensified. They go on to note that if work‐family conflicts have become highly stressful then personal support may in fact “be of little or no use – or even make things worse” (p.99). In terms of the type of support that is best provided by one’s partner the evidence from their study suggests that emotional support, which encompasses empathy, praise, information, and advice, has greater benefits than does behavioural support.

Support from employers in the form of family‐friendly organisations is given a resounding thumbs‐up in chapter seven. Although employees in family‐friendly organisations spend less time at work, this does not appear to affect their job performance. Furthermore, not only does such support lead to a range of beneficial outcomes for individuals in their work and personal lives, but it also engenders greater feelings of organisational commitment on the part of employees. Support from employers also plays a significant role in alleviating the penalties faced by working mothers.

In chapter eight, Friedman and Greenhaus summarise the major findings from their study and present their model of work‐family linkages. They then wrap things up in chapter nine with a series of conclusions and specific recommendations for making allies of work and family.

Overall, I found the book to be well written and interesting. However, in my view the authors’ claims regarding the contribution of the text to the work‐family literature are overstated. One of the book’s foremost strengths, its empirical focus, is also one of the major limitations. When appropriate methodological yardsticks are applied to evaluate the study on which the book is based it comes up short in several areas.

For starters, the survey respondents were from a very specific and quite élite segment of US society. I cannot help but feel there must be concerns about the generalisability of the findings when more than 90 per cent of the participants are Caucasian, more than 80 per cent are in mid‐ or upper‐level management positions, the majority earn an annual income of more than US$71,000, 20 per cent earn US$142,000 or more, and two‐thirds of the sample are male. Clearly this well educated and highly paid group will grapple with different issues and will have a quite different experience of work‐family conflict compared to your “average” family which may be struggling simply to make ends meet.

Also problematic is the response rate for the survey. More than 4,000 questionnaires were mailed out, from which only 861 usable responses were obtained. When more than three‐quarters of your target group has not responded, this raises questions as to the representativeness of the sample and potential bias in the results.

Another major methodological issue is the cross‐sectional nature of the survey. A single‐shot survey design of this sort does not easily lend itself to the determination of causative relationships amongst variables. This problem manifests itself in various ways throughout the book. For example, on many occasions Friedman and Greenhaus are left floundering for explanations to account for significant relationships observed in their data. The text is peppered with comments such as “these findings would seem to imply…” and “we think…” or “we believe…” and “it may be that…”. The book is an excellent illustration of how quantitative research of this type is good at answering “what” questions, but struggles more with “why”.

The limitations of the cross‐sectional design are also apparent from the fact that in many situations viable alternative explanations for the pattern of results cannot be ruled out by the authors. For example, in chapter five they suggest that “the more time mother’s take for their own relaxation, the better they feel about themselves as parents, the better they feel about their childcare arrangements, and the fewer their children’s behavior problems” (p. 80). Equally plausible is the possibility that parents whose children have few behaviour problems are more likely to feel satisfied with their childcare arrangements, are likely to feel better about themselves as parents, and consequently will take more time for their own relaxation. In this case the direction of causality is reversed completely. This is not an inconsequential issue given that much of the book is focussed on the development of the authors’ own causal model of work‐family linkages. I would have a great deal more confidence in their findings if they had adopted a longitudinal methodology and/or utilised structural equation modelling analyses.

What of the other claims regarding the distinct contributions made by the book that I alluded to earlier in this review? Certainly the authors devote considerable attention to systematically exploring cross‐domain effects. After all, this is at the heart of their book and is embodied in the title itself Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? However, such a perspective is by no means unique. The notion that work and family can have both positive and/or detrimental effects on each other has long been acknowledged (e.g. see Lambert, 1990). Nonetheless, Friedman and Greenhaus do suggest some intriguing and provocative connections between the two spheres of life. However, I do take issue with the notion that they incorporate multiple perspectives. When it is all said and done what they have is solely the employee perspective on multiple aspects of the work‐family dilemma. What is more, the collection of multiple measures from the same individual at the same time poses problems of its own in terms of common method variance and bias. Moreover, I am not entirely sure how much confidence we can have in measures such as those of job performance when they are self‐rated and comprise a single item.

All in all this is a book that does have flaws. Nonetheless, I found it engaging and would have little hesitation recommending it to those with an interest in the area, provided they bear in mind the limitations of the research on which the book is based. Practitioners will find some helpful suggestions for strategies to lessen the potential for work‐family conflict amongst business professionals and researchers may well be interested in testing further the model developed in the book. Right, I’m off to implement one of the book’s findings on what is important and give some partner support.