Work life balance

Answer

 This topic aligns within my degree in the sense that it focuses on the rights of employed individuals to be given time to attend to other life issues such as families, recreation, and visit relative among others apart from work, which is among the issues addressed in business law (labour law).     

Ollier-Malaterre et al. (2013) recommended that further studies should be done to establish the effect of national contextual factors on employee’s experience of work and non-work lives. 

However, Lewis and Beauregard (2018) argued that some of the contexts which shape the meanings of work-life balance include the global context, national context, organization context, and the temporal context. Nevertheless, previous studies have primarily focused on the impact of cultural and institutional contexts on work-life balance. As a result, there is need to examine the impact of national contextual factors on the experience of individuals about their work and non-work lives. 

Davis and Tuttle (2017) found out that inequalities, at the individual- and country-level, directly and indirectly shape perceptions of work-life balance among individual workers. However, the authors recommended that further studies should focus on the factors which affect workers’ experience of work and non-work lives. 

In the recent past, Davis and Tuttle (2017) were able to document; via a quantitative study, “…the importance of one nation-level characteristic, level of gender inequality, in shaping the experience of satisfaction with work-life balance. According to the authors “given the dual importance of work and non-work lives in the new economy, it is imperative for researchers to continue to investigate whether and how national-context does, and does not, shape how individuals experience their work and non-work lives”.   

The spillover model is centered on an individual carrying their skills, behavior, attitude, and emotions obtained from work or home (Lee, Back, & Chan, 2015; Michel, Bosch, & Rexroth, 2014).

The spillover model is premised on the assumption that work life has a likelihood of spilling over to non-work life.

The model will be used in the proposed study to explain the experiences of individuals about the work and non-work life. 

The Spillover model is used to examine the effect of work-life or work domain on the non-work life – the home domain (Mosier ,1990) .

This way, it provides researchers with insights into how employees transfer work-related emotions, attitudes, and wellbeing to their partners and other closely related people at home.

The spillover can be positive (work-family enrichment) or negative (work-life conflict); the latter is the most common, and thus of most interest to researchers.

Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory/model was developed by Geert Hofstede in 1980 as a framework for cross-cultural communication. The model’s primary aim is to determine the dimensions along which cultures and cultural values vary.  It uses a structure based on factor analysis to show the effects of a country’s culture on the values of its citizens and how the values relate to individual behavior. According to the model, there are six main dimensions or categories along which the cultural values of individuals from different societies or countries can be analyzed. These dimensions are: uncertainty avoidance; individualism vs. collectivism; short-term vs. long-term orientation; power distance (strength of social hierarchy); restraint vs. indulgence; and masculinity vs. femininity.

The existing studies on national context and the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions focus largely on how the factors and dimension affect or may affect teamwork and collaboration in workplaces with social diversity.

As a result, whether and the extent to which national-context (Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) influence employees’ perception of their work and non-work life remains under-researched.

National Context

According to Lewis and Beauregard (2018), the national context refers to the national layer in work family and work-life research and its intersection with structural differences and cultural factors. The context entails the economic, social, and cultural factors based on a specific region.

Employee’s Perception of their Work life Balance

Work life refers to the activities and actions taken by people in the fulfillment of their employment duties (Ibrahim, 2013). The perception of employees are their views about the manner in which they spend their time doing their job in the workplace.

Employees’ perception of the non-wok life

Non-work life is the type of life that is led by people doing their personal things and with their families and doing things that they enjoy. Employees have different views about how the national context factors affect how they experience their non-work life.diverse responsibilities (Lieberman, 2018; Giauque, Anderfuhren-Biget & Varone, 2016). 

It is not known if and to what extent UN employees’ LTO/STO, uncertainty avoidance, and feminity/masculinity predict their perceptions of work-life balance within the overall model.

To fulfill the research, the dissertation uses four variables: perceptions of work life balance, long-term/short-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and feminity/masculinity. 

As the dependent variable, perception of work-life balance will be measured at an ordinal level using the work-life balance as the measuring instrument.

On the other hand, the independent variables – long-term orientation/short term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and feminity/masculinity – will be measured at ordinal level using CV scale.

In both variables, the data will be aggregated to approximated intervals