What is it about?
Living conditions in cities are capable of significantly impacting quality of work-life through factors such as travel and commuting times, safety of commuters and ability of employees, to access public spaces. This study finds that gender, gender egalitarianism values and ease of living of the city of residence, interact significantly to impact positive and negative aspects of the work-family interface of working men and women in India.
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Why is it important?
Understanding the impact of contextual factors is becoming increasingly important to figuring out how work and family roles interact, and what work-family interventions might best benefit employees. In low ease of living cities, in a comparison of working women, this study found that women who held more traditional values surrounding gender egalitarianism, reported a higher level of negative work-family conflict as well as a higher level of spillover of positive behaviors and emotions between work and family, compared to women who held less traditional values surrounding gender egalitarianism. Comparing among men, in low ease of living cities, working men who held more traditional values surrounding gender egalitarianism reported a higher level of mainly positive spillover between work and family compared to egalitarian-minded working men living in the same cities. In high ease of living cities, there was no significant difference in positive or negative work-family experiences of working women. However, working men with more traditional values surrounding gender egalitarianism reported a higher level of negative work-family conflict than egalitarian-minded working men living in the same high ease of living cities.
Perspectives
National policies aimed at reducing work-family conflict of employees focus on paid leaves and support for child care and elder care. Organizational efforts to reduce work-family conflict of employees focus on providing family friendly benefits and family friendly supervisory practices. While all these forms of support are important and vital, results of this study throw in to the mix, additional factors that may need to be considered, in the design of work-family interventions. City context and gender attitudes and values of employees may need to be folded in to these programs to make them more effective in reducing employees’ work-family conflict. For instance, businesses in low ease of living cities may need to offer more material and instrumental support to employees to compensate for the lack of infrastructural development evidenced in these cities. Rather than steering work-family programs only, or mainly towards women as is commonly done, organizational eco-systems may want to consider encouraging participation from employees whose gender attitudes, beyond their gender, place them in a position to get bigger personal gains from a re-negotiation of work and family roles.
Ujvala Rajadhyaksha
Governors State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Does it matter where you live? Examining the impact of gender, gender egalitarianism and city context on the work–family interface, South Asian Journal of Business Studies, July 2020, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/sajbs-12-2019-0215.
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