Abstract
Changing demographic trends occurring in the work and family spheres have made combining work and family responsibilities an increasingly challenging task for employees in virtually every nation. However, previous studies on work-family conflict have focused predominantly on Western and developed nations, with little attention to the experience of work-family conflict across different national contexts. Only recently have studies begun to examine work-family conflict from cross-national perspective. This paper presents a review of cross-national studies on work-family conflict focusing on the influences of cultural, institutional and economic factors. Overall, the review suggests that existing cross-national research on work-family conflict is narrow in scope, with most studies focused mainly on identifying differences in prevalence of the phenomenon across national contexts. The paper outlines agenda for future research to increase understanding of contextual influences on the experience of work-family conflict.
Highlights
The phenomenon of work-family conflict has attracted enormous research attention over the past four decades due to the increased participation of women in the workforce and the concomitant changes in work and family structures
This paper focuses on culture-as-dimensions studies, because such studies offer greater insight into the impact of cultural dimensions on work-family issues
Cross-national research remains an emergent field in the work-family literature
Summary
The phenomenon of work-family conflict has attracted enormous research attention over the past four decades due to the increased participation of women in the workforce and the concomitant changes in work and family structures. Given that women may hold small proportion of managerial positions in low egalitarian cultures, supervisor ratings of female manager’s work-life balance could be influenced by stereotypic beliefs about women Another stream of research focuses on individualism-collectivism as a moderator in the relationships of work-family conflict with antecedent and outcome variables. These studies suggest that predictors of work-family conflict vary across different cultural contexts. The researchers further demonstrated that paid leave policies were more beneficial when employees’ perception of organizational and supervisor support were higher than when they were lower Together, these studies suggest that the positive impact of national level family policies on work-family experiences may be true for some specific policies but not others. The fact that the more affluent countries in this study tend to have greater prevalence of part-time work (cf. Steiber and Haas, 2012) suggests that the longitudinal child effects observed in more affluent countries could be explained by the availability of alternative employment options
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