Work-life balance of Chinese knowledge workers under flextime arrangement: the relationship of work-life balance support
- PDF / 463,933 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 64 Downloads / 193 Views
Work-life balance of Chinese knowledge workers under flextime arrangement: the relationship of work-life balance supportive culture and work-life spillover Louis Ka-hei Fung 1 & Ray Tak-yin Hui 2
& Wally
Chi-wai Yau 1
Received: 13 November 2020 / Accepted: 16 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract As an emerging human resource issue in business ethics, work-life balance (WLB) has been gaining increasing attention from both practitioners and scholars in recent years. In response to the call of Kelliher et al. (Human Resource Management Journal, 29(2):97–112, 2019), we addressed the research gap by examining the WLB of Chinese knowledge workers (i.e., software professionals in this study) under flextime arrangement (i.e., one very common type of flexible work arrangements) and the impact of work-life supportive culture on work-life spillover of the workers. Specifically, we examined the relationships between three components of work-life supportive culture, namely managerial support, career consequences, and organizational time demands, and two aspects of work-life spillover, positive and negative spillover, perceived by the workers. A quantitative survey with 35 employees in a software development company in Hong Kong was conducted. The results of structure equation modelling showed that managerial support was positively related to positive work-life spillover while organizational time demands (i.e., a negative component in WLB supportive culture) was positively related to employees’ negative spillover. WLB needs of knowledge workers and the role of organizational culture in effective implementation of WLB policies were discussed, and several feasible WLB policies were suggested for managers. Keywords Work-life balance . Work-life supportive culture . Work-life spillover .
Knowledge worker . Hong Kong
* Louis Ka-hei Fung [email protected]
1
Lee Shau Kee School of Business and Administration, Open University of Hong Kong, 30 Good Shepherd Street, Ho Man Tin,, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
2
NUCB Business School, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
Fung L.K.-h. et al.
Introduction The concern of work-life balance (WLB) is the logical consequences of the demographic change in the workplace, intensification of work, and fragmentation of time among workers, instead of a corporate fad (Chakraborti and Mishra 2018; Tan 2013). Employees begin to concern their abilities to fulfill the demands and achieve a balance between work and personal life; thus, WLB has become a critical indicator of an individual’s well-being (Tan 2013). Furthermore, previous studies suggested that, in today’s business world, companies are expected to bear more ethical obligations to help employees achieve WLB at work since it is considered a sign of social responsibility of the employers (Chakraborti and Mishra 2018; De Stefano et al. 2018; Heikkinen et al. 2020; Nie et al. 2018; Singhapakdi et al. 2019; Voegtlin et al. 2019; Zhang and Tu 2018). Heikkinen et al. (2020) and Wong (2018) also prop
Data Loading...
