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The Effectiveness of Family-Friendly Policies and the Mediating Roles of Work-Family Interface

Park, Sang-eon, Choi, Min-O

Chungbuk National University
Chungbuk National University

Published: January 2013 · Vol. 42, No. 2 · pp. 355-381
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Abstract

Because of the changing demographics in the workforce such as the rise of female workers and dual earner employees, nowadays more individuals face the challenge of managing work and family responsibilities. And for this reason, the issue of balancing work and family lives becomes receiving more attentions from both academic fields and business domains. In the face of these changing realities, many organizations have now begun to offer family-friendly human resource(HR) policies such as flexible work arrangements, supports for child care, and other benefits that support worker's personal well-being and career development. Up to date, there have been many researches that investigated the relationships between family-friendly HR policies and their effects on organizational effectiveness. To our knowledge,however, the intervening mechanisms in the relation between family-friendly policies and their consequential effects have not been fully explored. So, in the present study, we focused on the role of work-family interface, especially the role of work-family conflict and work-family enrichment that workers experience in the context of work and family lives. Last and most important, we proposed that work-family conflict and work-family enrichment may be two intervening mechanisms which mediate the effects of family-friendly policies to the psychological effectiveness of organizational members such as their job-related attitude and non-task behavior. Based on these theoretical and logical expectations, we intend to investigate empirically the effectiveness of family-friendly policies. Especially this study examines the relationship between employees' perceptions of the usefulness of family-friendly policies and their effects on the job attitudes and organizational citizenship behavior. In particular, this study also explores whether work-family conflict and work-family enrichment will mediate the relationship. The data are collected by surveying 293 respondents who are working in a manufacturing firm and a series of hierarchical regression analyses are used for the test of hypotheses. Findings are as follows. First, employees' perceptions of the usefulness of family-friendly policies were positively related not only to their job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment,but also to their organizational citizenship behavior as expectedly. In addition, we found that two directions of work-family enrichment (i.e., work-to-family and family-to-work enrichment)partly mediated the effects of family-friendly policies on affective organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. In particular, work-to-family enrichment had more larger mediating effects on the job attitude variables such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, whereas family-to-work enrichment had more mediating effects on the non-task behavior such as organizational citizenship behavior. Although two directions of work-family conflict (i.e., work-to-family and family-to-work conflict) did not mediate the relationships,instead they had direct negative impacts on the job attitudes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We think that our research provides both theoretical and practical contributions to the literatures of family-friendly policies and work-family studies. Above all, we proposed and empirically verified that work-family enrichment may be one of the possible intervening mechanism in the relationship between family-friendly HR policies and their effects on the job attitudes and non-task behaviors of employee. In addition, this study answered the call to explore the positive side of work-family interface, which, at present, is underrepresented compared with work-family conflict. According to the present study, the perceived availability and usefulness of familyfriendly HR policies increase the work-family enrichment of organizational members, which in turn, relates not only to their higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but also to their higher organizational citizenship behavior. In these respects, we think, this study expands the conceptual understanding of family-friendly HR policies and especially work-family interface. The implications of these findings for organizations seeking to help employees with family-friendly HR practices and work-family balance issues are then suggested. The limitations of this study and future research directions are also discussed.
Keywords: 가정친화제도직장-가정 향상직장-가정 갈등직무만족조직몰입조직시민행동