TIME AND THE WORK/FAMILY INTERFACE IN A FORTUNE 500 ORGANIZATION: THE DIRECT AND INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF TEMPORAL STRUCTURES, OUT-OF-OFFICE CONTACT, AND POLYCHRONICITY ON NEGATIVE WORK-TO-FAMILY SPILLOVER

1 online resource (173 pages) : PDF

2013

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The modern economy is high-paced and demanding, in part due to globalization's effect on business processes and expanded technological capabilities; as a result, employees can experience greater pressure and stress in the workplace that can lead to increased work/family conflict. In light of these more challenging conditions for employees, some work/family scholars have adjusted the theoretical lens by which they operationalize and explain work/family conflict to incorporate employees' temporal norms, cultures, and structures. For example, many organizational scholars have explored how hours worked, paid-time-off, and even work pacing, timing, and cycles are related to work/family conflict. In this dissertation, I employ Layered-Task Time (LTT) - a structural temporal construct that is inherently linked to an employee's work experience - to define workplace conditions that predict negative work-to-family spillover. In addition, I combine this temporal approach with the degree to which employees are contacted outside of the typical workplace and hours (henceforth referred to as "out-of-office contact" or "OOOC") to explore how the integrated nature of the work and nonwork domains influences the work/family interface. Using data from a large, bureaucratically organized Fortune 500 insurance company, I examine the first-order effects of the LTT components on negative work-to-family spillover, and, in an effort to also extend current work/family theory, the interactive effect of these temporal conditions with out-of-office contact on negative work-to-family spillover. Finally, I also explore the interactive effect of polychronicity, or the degree to which one prefers multi-tasking, on both of these sets of relationships in order to better understand how polychronicity can buffer the negative influence of these temporal conditions and the interactive effect of these temporal conditions with OOOC frequency on negative work-to-family spillover. The results support the majority of the hypotheses presented in this dissertation - specifically, that the temporal conditions operationalized in this dissertation predict negative work-to-family spillover, and that when these temporal conditions are combined with increased work-related contact outside of the traditionally defined work place/time, those effects are stronger. I find support that polychronicity interacts with some of these temporal conditions as well as many of the interactions between these temporal conditions and out-of-office contact to buffer the negative implications of these constructs for negative work-to-family spillover. Finally, I discuss the implications of this research for practice as well as for the theoretical state of current temporality and work/family literature.

doctoral dissertations

Organizational behavior
Management
Organizational sociology

Ph.D.

Information Technology
Layered-Task Time
Out-Of-Office Contact
Polychronicity
Temporality
Work/family Balance

Organizational Science

Rubin, Beth

Brody, Charles
Rogelberg, Steven
Scott, Clifton

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2013.

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Agypt_uncc_0694D_10508

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:1515