Women professionals in South Africa : the interaction between work life balance and organisational commitment

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to investigate the possibility that women are committed to their professional lives (work) and their family/social life (home), and that this commitment to both work and home results in the proposed fifth level of commitment; polarised commitment. People are now working harder and longer than ever before due to globalisation, the 24 hour market place and the compression of time and space by information and communication technology. The boundary between paid work and personal lives is becoming more blurred (Lewis, 2003). Work and family commitments are time greedy in nature and are fundamentally difficult to reconcile. A questionnaire consisting out of a demographics section, Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday et al’s, 1979) and the Industrial Society’s Work Life Check List (Dex and Bond, 2005) was sent out to participants via a snowball sampling method. In order to support the proposed fifth level of commitment; polarised commitment, a Pearson’s correlation test was performed on the results obtained for the Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday et al’s, 1979) and the Industrial Society’s Work Life Check List (Dex and Bond, 2005). Even though literature supports polarised commitment, the results were inconclusive. It is therefore recommended to conduct further research utilising different methods to support polarised commitment theory. Copyright