Abstract
Parents returning to work after the arrival of a new son or daughter is an important question for understanding the trajectory of people's lives and professional careers amid current debates about gender equality and work-life balance (WLB). Interestingly, current research concludes that general WLB practices at the workplace may be necessary in the specific case of women returning to work after childbirth because of the particular maternal and infant factors involved. However, WLB practices as a flexible arrangement may work against women because they may be viewed as a lack of organizational commitment. Therefore, research on this topic could benefit from considering supervisor support as a complement of such practices, but previous research has analyzed WLB and supervisor support separately and scarcely. To fill this gap in the literature, we use two sub-samples of 664 female employees and 749 male employees with children under the age of one from 27 European countries participating in the 6th European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS-2015) to study the impact of perceived WLB on European women's perceived well-being after childbirth, in contrast with previous literature. We also analyze the impact of perceived supervisor support (SS) and its interaction with perceived WLB on women's well-being after childbirth, and explore differences with men after childbirth, a collective underexplored by the literature. We find significant gender differences on the relative impact of WLB, SS, and their interaction on perceived job well-being. Our results have important implications for human resource practices in organizations. In particular, they suggest that gendered WLB practices should be encouraged, and stress the relevance of the human factor over human resource practices in addressing the difficulties that women returning to work face after childbirth.
Highlights
Parents returning to work after childbirth is an important question for understanding the trajectory of people’s lives and professional careers amid current debates about gender equality and work-life balance (WLB); being WLB understood as satisfaction and good functioning at work and at home with minimal conflict between parents’ roles at both domains (Clark, 2000).In the case of women, the benefits of they being employed are broad, including improvements in their mental and physical health, social support, and financial resources (Coulson et al, 2012), Job Well-Being after Childbirth and many countries have become aware of the need to create conditions that facilitate women’s abilities to combine their working and family lives (Kreyenfeld, 2010)
WLB, and supervisor support (SS) were positively associated with job well-being for both employed women and men, whereas the interaction variable had a negative and weak correlation with well-being for both sub-samples
Our tests for hierarchical regressions (Table 3) showed that the variance inflation factor (VIF) values ranged from 1.006 to 1.076 in the female sub-sample and from 1.011 to 1.093 in the male subsample, both of which were much lower than the recommended cut-off threshold of 10 (Hair et al, 1992)
Summary
Parents returning to work after childbirth is an important question for understanding the trajectory of people’s lives and professional careers amid current debates about gender equality and work-life balance (WLB); being WLB understood as satisfaction and good functioning at work and at home with minimal conflict between parents’ roles at both domains (Clark, 2000). In the particular case of women after childbirth, when examining SS, we can certainly expect that supervisors’ opinions, whether positive or negative, about women’s use of WLB options may be relevant for women considering accessing them, as well as for the supervisor transferring their opinions to colleagues This idea is in line with findings from studies by Babin and Boles (1996) or Parasuraman et al (1992), which found that supervisory support can help decrease work stress to provide employees with more job well-being. We propose the following hypothesis: H3: The greater the SS is, the stronger the impact of perceived WLB on the job well-being of women after childbirth
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