Happily Exhausted: Work Family Dynamics in India

Abstract

Despite the importance of India on the global scene, its unique culture, and the growing concerns about work-family balance in this country, existing work-family research in India is scarce. Moreover, it is predominantly quantitative and conducted using scales developed in Western developed countries, which limits our understanding of the work-family dynamics in the Indian context. Our research addresses these concerns through an emic study investigating idiosyncratic factors of the Indian context stemming from ancient philosophies as well as socio-economic structures. We conducted a qualitative, exploratory study of the work-family interface with 50 professional men and women in the private and public sectors in both large and small cities in India. Our findings reveal an intriguing combination of high family centrality, traditional gender roles, high work and family demands, with work construed as a means to support family, within a dense web of social support/obligations, and role integration being viewed as natural and organic. This combination resulted, perhaps surprisingly for the Westerners, in our interviewees feeling “happily exhausted”; that is, despite high role demands, they reported low work-family conflict (because they accepted spillover well) and high work-family enrichment. Nuances across more or less globalized cities and across the public and private industry sectors are discussed. This study contributes new knowledge on the work-family interface and opens future avenues for work-family research in other non-Western and less developed countries.