Family-work conflict, job satisfaction and burnout of working women with children

Abstract

Work and family embody two of the most fundamental areas of adult life. The increased participation in the labour force of working women with children has had a major impact on the work and family interface. Theories of work and family have been incorporated to analyse potential relationships of conflict with undesirable work outcomes such as reduced job satisfaction and burnout. The study investigates whether work-family conflict ultimately leads to working women with children’s experiences of burnout and lower job satisfaction. The research study also explores the effects of the mother-role identity on the manifestation of family and work conflict in working women with children and posits that working women with children experience role salience differently from other working women without children. The study employed a quantitative research design using electronic self-administered questionnaires. Using the data from 545 employees in a fast-moving consumer goods industry showed that working women with children who identified closer with the mother-role identity, experienced greater work-family conflict. The mother-role identity forms a greater part of working women with children’s self than that of the employee-role identity and the results infer that role identity plays a significant role when conflict is experienced. In working women with children, strong relationships were found between family-work conflict and burnout, and moderate inverse relationships between work-family conflict and job satisfaction. Work-family conflict may ultimately lead working women with children to experience higher burnout and lower job satisfaction owing to their preoccupation with family-related responsibilities. The concept of role identity is introduced as a significant variable to consider into the work and family conflict investigation, as well as in the development of burnout and job satisfaction for working women with children. The current research also assists in understanding the work and family role integration of working women with children and provides a consolidated overview of the current work and family theories within a conceptual and unifying model. This research offers an explanatory model that outlines the relationship between the independent and dependent variables, by investigating the mechanisms by virtue of which such relationships exist.