The role of personalistic variables in the experience of work-life interaction and its effect on employee work engagement

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Employee engagement has become imperative for the long term sustainability and performance of organisations. In the current study, work-life interaction was hypothesized to have a direct effect on employee work engagement.Work-life balance, as a facet of work-life interaction, was defined in this study as having enough time to fulfil activities in both work and family contexts; maintaining a sense of equilibrium or harmony in life, having equal or balanced involvement, effort and time spent on various roles; as well as a balance between demands and resources in a person's life, achieving a state of satisfaction in both employment and personal roles (De Cieri, Holmes, Abbott & Pettit, 2005; Hudson, 2005). Work-life balance has positive consequences for the employee in the form of higher levels of satisfaction and commitment, and improved personal health and wellbeing. For the organisation it is associated with improved recruitment and retention, improved employee productivity and performance, improved organisational performance and profitability, and increased work engagement.In the current study the overarching concept of work-life interaction was utilised to guide the empirical research. The study was motivated by the intention to clarify the antecedents of work-life interaction in a particular work environment in order to inform efforts aimed at promoting positive work-life interaction. Personalistic traits were anticipated to influence the relationship between organisational variables and work-life interaction. A literature review has led to a theoretical model to be utilised in investigating the determinants of work-life interaction and whether the nature of work-life interaction experienced enhances employee work engagement. The aim of the study was to determine whether a negative relationship exists between role conflict, work demands and work-life interaction and a positive relationship exists between work-family culture and work-life interaction. The research further aimed to establish whether specific personalistic variables such as conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, negative affectivity, positive affectivity and emotional intelligence influence the relationships between the organisational variables and work-life interaction.The observed inter-correlations show that the organisational variables are weakly to moderately correlated with most of the work-life dimensions. The results confirmed that there are negative correlations between role conflict, work demand and the positive forms of work-life interaction, and positive correlations between these two variables and the negative forms of work-life interaction. In contrast, work-home culture is positively related to the positive forms of work-life interaction, and negatively to the negative forms of work-life interaction. The moderated regression analyses found that only neuroticism and agreeableness had significant moderating effects on the relationship between work demand and work-life interaction, whilst a greater number of mediating effects were observed. An overview of the multiple regression analyses with the work-home interaction dimensions as dependent variables, found a significant difference between the amount of variance explained by the organisational variables and the additional variance explained by the personalistic variables in two analyses pertaining to positive work-home interaction and positive home-work interaction.The study has confirmed the role of organisational variables in the experience of work-life interaction and the positive role of the work-home culture of the organisation has been highlighted. The results provided limited support for the role of personalistic variables as moderators and more substantial support for its role as mediators of work-life interaction. The impact of positive affectivity was especially noticeable. The results further indicated that work engagement was significantly positively correlated with positive work-home interaction, negatively correlated with negative work-home interaction, and positively correlated with positive home-work interaction.These findings provide additional motivation to include selected personalistic variables in the selection process so that the likelihood of work engagement could be optimised through increased work-live balance. It further suggests focusing the attention of employees suffering from negative work-life interaction on their personal processing of the challenges experienced and their coping strategiesThe results indicated that the conceptualised theoretical model was seriously flawed and too simplistic and that it required serious reconsidering.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University