Realistic Recruitment as a Protective Antecedent of Work Interference with Family

Abstract

Both managers and scholars maintain that the work and family roles are the two most central and prevalent roles performed in one's adult life (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992; Michel, Mitchelson, Kotrba, LeBreton, & Baltes, 2009). Therefore, understanding the intersection of work and family roles is highly important for both research and practice (Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997). Previous research indicates that perceptions of conflict between these roles can engender negative work outcomes such as lower job satisfaction (Allen, Herst, Bruck, & Sutton, 2000), lower organizational commitment (Carr, Boyar, & Gregory, 2008), and higher physical symptoms of stress (Allen et al., 2000). Furthermore, recent research found that high levels of work-family conflict can exacerbate the relationship between burnout and organizational cynicism (Simha, Elloy, & Huang, 2014). Given these research findings, scholars and practitioners argue that aiding employees in their attempts to balance their work and family roles is a business and social imperative (Carlson, Grzywacz, & Zivnuska, 2009).Many organizations try to reduce the negative outcomes associated with work-family conflict by implementing alternative practices designed to promote work-life balance (Messersmith, 2007; Thompson & Aspinwall, 2009). Such alternative practices include compressed work weeks, flexible work hours, job sharing, and telecommuting (Johnson, 2004). However, the nature of work performance within some organizations prevents them from offering these types of alternatives (Rotondo, Carlson, & Kincaid, 2003). For instance, certain categories of employees, such as teachers or nurses, may be unable to take advantage of some common work-life benefits such as flexible work hours or compressed work weeks because their presence on the job is required during typical business hours (that is, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday). Therefore, work-life benefits, although shown to reap positive benefits for some organizations, are simply not feasible in all organizations.Just as organizations vary in their ability to offer work-life benefits, individuals also have varying expectations regarding the work-family interface. Employee expectations regarding work-family balance are increasingly part of the psychological contract; that is, the individual employee's expectations relative to the conditions of employment and the nature of the exchange relationship with the employer (Blomme, van Rheede, & Tromp, 2010). For example, some employees expect flexible working arrangements, and perceive that the promises implied in the psychological contract have been broken when employers do not make these arrangements available to them (Smithson & Lewis, 2004). Research found that employee perceptions of the extent that the employer broke promises regarding workload and work hours was positively related to employees' perceptions of work-family conflict (Sturges & Guest, 2004). These findings suggest that realism in recruitment practices may influence individual expectations regarding the work-family interface. Further, the extent that these expectations are met may have important implications for employee reactions toward both their work arrangements and the organization.This study examines whether the use of realistic recruitment practices, such as realistic job previews (RJPs), affects the degree that employee expectations regarding work-life balance are met. The theoretical foundation for our examination is expectancy theory that addresses the role of alignment of instrumentality for work motivation (Vroom, 1964). This suggests RJPs could serve as a protective antecedent (Lu et al., 2010) to help reduce perceptions of work-family conflict by aligning employee expectations with reality. Figure 1 outlines our proposed model. Specifically, we test whether realistic recruitment practices containing information about the work-family interface will influence employees' expectations regarding work-family balance to be met, thus leading to decreases in employee perceptions of the work role interfering with the family role. …