contributed articles
WORK-FAMILY CONFLICT (WFC) is an important
line of inquiry in organizational behavior and
human resource management research. The topic
is relevant to the computing and communication
field not only because modern communication
technologies allow for more integration of work and
family roles than ever before15 but because recent
advances in computing technology offer new ways
to respond to and understand WFC. WFC has been
empirically associated with employees’ job and life
dissatisfaction, poor physical and psychological
health, and rising voluntary turnover rates and work
stress.
5 WFC has also been found to have a negative
correlation with various aspects of organizations,
including performance, commitment, psychological
contract, and even strategy planning.
20 Our analysis of
American Community Survey and Census data21 from
2015 found over 75.2% of males and over 60.5% of
females in married couples have their own earnings,
with dual-income families emerging
as the predominant family structure in
the U.S.
Considerable effort has gone toward
trying to understand the antecedents
and role of WFC. Research shows individual characteristics and experience
influence perception of WFC,
6 with two
significant implications for the dynamics of WFC: Different individuals may
respond to the same WFC differently,
and individuals may react to the same
WFC differently over time through
their attempts to cope with WFC and
their changing situations. However,
not enough research has considered
the dynamics of WFC, especially regarding individual differences. In addition, no one fully understands the
relationships between WFC and job
and family satisfaction sufficiently due
to inconsistent findings about their
relationships across different studies.
14, 17 Moreover, emerging social media could be reshaping the dynamics of
WFC and remains unexplored.
Our study began to fill these gaps in
the literature by recognizing the great
potential of social-media data to help
social scientists, as well as business
managers, discover the dynamics of
WFC and advance understanding of
the relationships between WFC and
job and family satisfaction in modern
society. In addition, the social-media
analytics approach we used has significant methodological implications for
WFC research. First, work-family (WF)
The Dynamics
of Work-Family
Conflict
DOI: 10.1145/3081884
Conflict is averted by separating work
and family time and responsibility,
as reflected in millions of tweets.
BY YILI LIU AND LINA ZHOU
key insights
˽ Work-family conflict can potentially
undermine employees’ feelings of
satisfaction for job and family life.
˽ Our study analyzes streams of social-media data collected from more than
93,000 users, overcoming many
limitations of survey and diary methods
that dominate traditional research in
work-family conflict.
˽ The findings highlight the dynamics of
time-based and strain-based conflict,
helping explain mixed findings about the
relationship between work-family conflict
and job and family satisfaction generally
found in the literature.