Work-Family Conflict

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Soomro, Breitenecker & Shah (2018) Work-life balance contributes to a healthy, happy, and successful life. It has always remained a major concern to individuals who desire a good quality of work-life balance and ultimately a good quality of life. The danger of work-life imbalance was envisaged by field experts some 25 years ago in discussions on the downside of technology influencing work environments.

Three major concerns have been raised by scholars regarding work-life imbalance as it is affected by technological influence. First, developments at work that can threaten the work life balance. Second, the changing nature of work activities, and especially tasks linked with technology demanding current knowledge of the field. Third, the changing work demands that can affect individuals and their lives outside the work environment. Nevertheless, what so ever the reasons are that result in an increase in the work-to-family or family-to-work imbalance. Soomro, Breitenecker & Shah (2018)

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Work-family conflict is a form of inter-role conflict in the shape of negative overabundance from work-to-family domains. It actually determines the degree of stress for an employee when employees spend more time working, which results in less time available for the family. The conflict between the two roles, work and family, is inevitable because both pull in opposite directions, which are simply incompatible with each other as the two realms invoke different demands, priorities, norms, expectations, and requirements Work-family conflict is a stress variable that arises when an individual gives more time to work, which results in conflict with family demands. Accordingly, work and family roles are inversely proportional to each other, giving time to one role results in conflicts with the other role It can be very demanding for a person rushing through urgent tasks and realigning schedules to handle opposing demands and the situation is one where an employee is likely to find it difficult to establish a satisfactory work-to-family balance. Soomro, Breitenecker & Shah (2018). Past studies on conflicts in the work and family environments tend to be unidirectional, investigating how work affects family, while today, these conflicts are reported to be bi-directional which means not only does work spill over to affect family issues, but family affairs can also spill over into the work realm. The two concepts are sufficiently different in nature and scope to warrant independent examination a meta-analysis by Byron (2005) found that the family-work conflict and the work-family conflict are different because they have unique antecedents and attitudes (e.g., demographic, work, and non-work-related variables.

Issues affecting all sectors in Pakistan include debilitating economic conditions, unsustainable economic policies, a negative balance of payments, increasing inflation rates, climatic catastrophic effects (floods and earthquakes), terrorist attacks, and low levels of foreign direct investment have put immense pressure on employees also. Consequently, employees have to work hard, often involving working extra hours, to meet their financial obligations, and the result can often be an imbalance between work and family. Long working hours increase job-to-home which may adversely affect employees’ job performance and organizations’ productivity and profits. Soomro, Breitenecker & Shah (2018). 

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