Work and Family: why it's smart to value family

It is commonly called, "work and family conflict". The premise is that a good family life takes time and energy and that work and family compete for this fixed resource.   Most research in work and family conflict looks at possible tradeoffs: does working affect family life negatively, or does placing too much attention on family, leave less energy for work?

Behavioral Research

One type of behavioral research has found negative spillover effects in both directions - from work to home and home to work.   Whatever time and energy you spend in one area will take away from your performance in the other area.

Another branch of behavioral research looks at the different requirements of each role and notes that individuals have difficulty moving from one sphere to the other, and so end up concentrating on one area at the cost of the other.  

It is interesting to note that in a recent case study where "family friendly" policies were introduced in the workplace, it was found that employees were not taking advantage of the new policies.   When asked why, the employees stated that they would rather be at work than home.   Is work becoming, for both men and women, a haven from home?

Labor Economic Research

This research finds marriage to be quite lucrative for men - married men earn more money than unmarried men do.   There are several reasons why this is true: men work harder when they have a family to support, and employers are more likely to hire married men and more likely to promote men with family responsibilities.  

Peter Cappelli and Jill Constantine and Clint Chadwick take a new approach to the subject in their article It Pays to Value Family: Work and Family Tradeoffs Reconsidered in Industrial Relations, Vol. 39, No. (April 2000)

Instead of asking if there is a tradeoff between work and family they ask, "how does making family a priority affect one´s long-term labor market success?"   In other words, is there a cost to putting family first?

This research is innovative because they have considered the two streams of research - behavioral and economic.   Until now the two literatures have been quite separate.   Labor economics looks at the effect family have on earnings and behavioral research looks at emotional or behavioral effects associated with work and family conflicts.  

In "It Pays to Value Family" the authors´ hypothesize that "the greater importance given to family should be negatively related to subsequent earnings for men and women."  

As they note, the higher earnings of married men do not mean that these individuals value family.   In fact it could mean the exact opposite - that their "success" at work cost them a happy family life.

Instead, as an indicator of commitment to family, this study used data in which those surveyed were asked about their attitudes towards marriage, work, family and community.   Fourteen years later, wage data were collected for the same group.   All data used in the study were derived from the National Longitudinal Survey.

Results

How the respondents graded the importance of "finding the right person to marry and having a happy family life"   -- called the family life priority variable --was positively related to their earnings fourteen years later.

Men who placed more importance on the value of family earned more money than men who did not think that family and a good marriage were a priority.   The variable was not significant for women.

Where Do We Go from Here?

 

The implication of this study is that the tradeoff between work and family, identified in the behavioral literature, does not always apply.   Giving importance to a good family life means success in the workplace as measured by earnings.

What is valuable about this research is that it suggests a different way of asking questions about work and family.   The authors conclude with a discussion about our assumptions.   We assume that the effort taken to have a good family life is effort that we could be using at work.   But this is probably not true.   Instead we could look at what having a poor family life costs us.   The demands of conflicts that arise from bad marriages and divorce can have huge consequences at work.  

"Thus the relevant question may not be how much a good family life costs but how much a bad family life costs and whether avoiding one has a labor market payoff."

By: Vicki Skelton