Dual-Career Couple's Research: Work-Life Balance
Highlights
As
part of my dissertation research, I studied how marital satisfaction of
dual-income couples affected their commitment to their employer. A
summary of the findings is provided here as further evidence of the
need for a new model for relationships (especially dual-income), as
described in The Business of Love.
This was a descriptive
research study that involved data collection using a marital
satisfaction and an organizational commitment questionnaire. The
setting for the study involved 25 organizations that represented the
public, private and non-profit sectors. The main question that guided
the study was:
What was the relationship between employees’ degree of marital satisfaction
and their commitment to their current employer?
The
relationship between employee and employer is changing at an
unprecedented rate and intensity. Concurrently, today’s families must
cope in a dynamic environment where the definition of what it means to
be a family has undergone a permanent transformation. In a single
generation, dual-income marriages have gone from being rare to being
the norm. These dual-income couples are faced with the typical
pressures that can affect any marriage along with a unique set of
challenges never faced by any other generation in U.S. history.
Further
complicating matters is the fact that there is a growing emphasis on
corporate performance often achieved through short-term strategies that
include rapid outsourcing of all but “mission critical” jobs, only to
have the same employees return as part-time contractors or consultants.
In addition, decades of mergers, acquisitions, layoffs,
bankruptcies, off-shoring and outsourcing have shattered employment
security and worker commitment. Finally, as social research shows, in
post 9/11 America, and in the aftermath of hurricanes of 2005, the
heightened concerns of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers about divorce,
childrearing and elder care, have developed into a strong sensitivity
to quality of work/life issues.
Dual-Income Couples Divorcing Their Employers
This
study, along with many others, reveals a very troubling trend among
dual-income couples and their level of commitment to their employers.
Their response is, in part, to protect their marriages and to spend
more time in family activities.
- For these reasons, many of
today’s best and brightest employees are lowering their career
expectations, cutting back on their work hours and actively disengaging
from the demands of their jobs despite employers’ best efforts to be
sensitive, responsive and family-friendly.
- One in three,
dual-income employees are placing fixed constraints on the number of
hours they will work and 75% of dual-income employees are scaling back
career expectations and commitment to work.
- It is no
coincidence that this is occurring at a time with the national rate of
marriage has dropped 50% in the past 4 decades, and based on some
estimates, nearly 1 in 2 marriages fail. In response, many couples are
eliminating their previous commitments to their employers in favor of a
quality lifestyle featuring less interference from work, placing fixed
constraints on the number of hours they work, and reducing disruption
in their children's lives by taking a one-career, one-job approach.
Most Employers Are Unaware They Are Losing the Battle
This
is happening at a time when Human Resource professionals are struggling
with developing appropriate and sustainable strategies to deal with an
ever-tightening labor market. Corporate response has been mixed, at
best, and despite many high profile attempts to implement an array of
family-friendly policies, the actual practice of being family-friendly
often fails to achieve meaningful changes in the organization’s
culture.
Despite claims to the contrary, employees believe
that their employer expects them to invest in their jobs first and,
minimize the intrusion of family obligations. Available research on the
negative spillover of work into the home indicates that undesirable
effects can be moderated by supportive supervision, by employers and by
providing employees with greater flexibility and autonomy over hours of
work. Yet, many employers are resistant to accommodating the peculiar
nature of the dual-income couples, and many employees believe that
allowing children to disrupt work means your career options are
diminished.
Fortunately, some companies have established
packages of family-friendly benefits, including flexible scheduling,
flextime, and parental leave. These benefits are not so much to
accommodate the unique needs of dual-income employees but more as a
recruiting tool. There is clear evidence that working parents are
attracted to organizations that offer a balance between work and family
responsibilities, but once again, there is often a significant gap
between policy and practice. While their intentions may be positive,
many corporate executives are deceiving themselves if they think that
family-friendly programs and polices are improving employee commitment
or are worth the investment.
It can become easier to focus
on the external family-friendly rankings a company might gain, than it
does to make the substantive changes in the organizational culture
required to turn policy into practice that employees actually feel and
believe. Human Resources executives routinely compete for top rankings
in an ever-growing number of corporate contests such as the:
• "100 Best Companies to Work For,"
• "50 Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America,"
• "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers,"
• "Top 50 Companies for Diversity,"
• "Best Companies for Women of Color,"
• "50 Best Companies for Latinas,"
• "Best Employers for Workers Over 50,”
• "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government."
While
pursuing such recognition is not inherently wrong, it is a flawed
strategy. If the practice of being family-friendly is to ever become an
engrained part of an organization’s culture, the employees are the ones
that should be doing the ranking. Top rankings as a family-friendly
company may ensure a steady flow of dual-income job seekers, but
without establishing a true family-friendly culture, these same
individuals, once they become employees, will quickly realize that the
policy does not translate to practice… they feel deceived.
Nationwide,
over 70% of mothers with children younger than 18 hold down paying jobs
and more than one in two mothers with children less than a year old are
working. Every one of them had to face that emotionally wrenching
return to the workplace after maternity leave, mostly out of economic
necessity. Many working mothers employed by Fortune 500 companies
frequently avoid requesting flexible scheduling, flextime, or parental
leave, because they fear that this will lower their standing for
promotions or increase the likelihood of their being laid off.
Perhaps
most telling of the gap between family-friendly, human resources policy
and practice is that of 384 Fortune 500 companies that extended some
type of paternity leave to their male employees, it was found that in
total only nine of those companies had received a single request for
this benefit.
Most male employees are reluctant to take advantage of
any family-friendly benefits because they believe it will jeopardize
their careers. Even when organizations provide benefits that address
work-family conflicts, a significant number of employees fear that they
will be seen as less than top performers if they actually use them.
Some Employers Are Becoming Enlightened
This
and other studies are creating a better understanding of how
family-friendly, human resource policies and practices can affect
marital satisfaction of dual-income workers. In turn, this can increase
the commitment of these employees as measured by their motivation,
contribution, energy, time and productivity. The results provide
insight for employers dealing with the affect of key workplace trends
that are creating unprecedented challenges for corporate executives, in
terms of finding and keeping talented employees in a dynamic business
environment.
Enlightened executives, who focus on the
organization’s culture, are in a unique position to examine the real
value of their existing family-friendly policies and develop innovative
Human Resource strategies to positively affect the lives of their
employees and not simply compete for rankings in a popularity contest.
Family-friendly benefits could be identified that are meaningful, worth
the investment, and are actually used by employees. Human Resource
executives will have a competitive advantage in attracting the growing
scarcity of the best and brightest workers who can be equally committed
to family and career, if they have an employer who supports both.
Additional
research is needed to fully explore the relatively unstudied
relationship between employee commitment and marital satisfaction. The
currently available data about the relationship between organizational
commitment and marital satisfaction of dual-income couples has not
produced clear findings about the strength of that relationship,
whether it is positive or negative, or the influence of demographic and
job-related variables upon the relationship.
It is anticipated
that additional research will have theoretical and practical
significance that would represent a meaningful addition to the existing
data about dual-income families in general, and about the relationship
between marital satisfaction and organizational commitment, in
particular. Also, there appears to be few studies that assess the
influence of demographic variables such as gender and age upon the
strength of the relationship between marital satisfaction and
organizational commitment.
This type of research may also be
useful in determining the value of current family-friendly work
policies, in modifying those policies to reduce work/family conflict,
and in identifying those workers who are most likely to benefit from
family-friendly policies or those who might suffer most from the
absence of family-friendly policies.
Finally, additional
research into the various theories about the implications of work/life
balance might lead to the development of a new understanding about the
evolving work-family facilitation model. Unlike most previous research
that assumes work and family are in conflict, the facilitation model
views work and family as complimentary. Previous models were
pre-disposed to view the new phenomena of dual-income couples as
negative.
The explosion of dual-income couples in the past few
decades was seen as disruptive and in contrast to the traditional
family with one parent, usually the mother, not working outside of the
home. Now, however, more study is needed to gauge the long-term
influence on work and family since dual-income couples have become the
norm in our society and in the workforce.