Work-Family Conflict

Work-Family Conflict

work-family conflict, defined as the degree to which an individual's work and family lives are incompatible, is a significant problem in organizations. Evidence suggests that work-family conflict is associated with increased turnover, poor performance, and poor employee and family health (Allen et al., 2000; Greenhaus et al., 2006). All of these issues raise ‘bottom-line’ concerns in organizations. Moreover, given that work family conflict is fundamentally rooted in societal changes related to women's large scale entrance in to the labor-force, the problem arising from work-family conflict are widespread and likely to persist. Given both the extent and importance of the problem, the work-family conflict literature has burgeoned in the past decade, and researchers have made substantial gains in understanding both work family conflict and organizational attempts to manage it.

Our goal in the chapter is to advance work family conflict research. To accomplish this goal, we focus on two primary specific aims. First, we will document what is known about work-family conflict as it relates to organizational behavior by critically reviewing existing research. Second, we will outline a high-priority agenda for future organizational behavior research. The chapter is organized chronologically with the first section describing work-family conflict research in the past. ‘The past’ section begins with an overview of the oretical origins of the work-family conflict construct, and it continues with a brief discussion of the phases of work-family conflict research including influential papers. Our discussion of the evolution of work family conflict is brief because the progression of this literature has been described (Frone, 2003), and there are several reviews of the work-family conflict literature (Bellavia and Frone, 2005; Eby et al., 2005; Geurts and Demerouti, 2003) as well as chapters on work-family conflict (Carlson and Grzywacz, 2008; MacDermid, 2005; Tetrick and Buffardi, 2006), and numerous edited volumes on work and family (Jones et al., 2006; Kossek and Lambert, 2005; Pitt-Catsouphes et al., 2006). In the section focused on ‘the present,’ we describe several key debates in the work-family conflict literature and we characterize current research (i.e., dated 20002006) informing these debates. We then highlight several emerging issues in the work family conflict literature. In the final section [Page 452]of the chapter, we conclude by articulating several key areas for future research.