Work-Family Balance

From Work-Family Conflict to Work-Family Enrichment: Competing Negative and Positive Views

Traditionally, researchers have assumed a win-lose relationship between work and family and focused on work-family conflict, which is based on the belief that individuals have limited time and resources to allocate to their many life roles. Most research relevant to the notion of work-family balance has been conducted on work-family conflict, which can be viewed as the opposite of work-family balance.

The construct work-family balance is a more positive way of viewing work-family relationships. It is consistent with the emergence of a new stream of research being promulgated by such writers as Greenhaus and Powell on work-family enrichment, the idea that work and family can enrich and complement each other. Overall, research on work-family balance can be characterized as being organized along these competing positive and negative perspectives.

Work-Family Conflict

The negative perspective on balancing work-family relationships emerges from role conflict theory, which, as Goode noted, assumed that having multiple roles is distracting, depletes resources, and results in role strain and overload. With regard to work-family roles, when employees try to carry these competing demands out while being embedded in traditional workplaces that are designed to support separation of work and family demands, they are likely to experience higher work-family role conflict.

Greenhaus and Beutell wrote one of the earliest theoretical articles on work-family conflict. They defined work-family conflict as a type of inter-role conflict, where work and family roles are incompatible and seen as competing for an individual's time, energy, and behaviors on and off the job. Their work built on earlier role theory by Ebaugh and others who defined a role as involving behavioral expectations associated with a position in a social structure.

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