Work‐Family Balance and Job Satisfaction: The Impact of Family‐Friendly Policies on Attitudes of Federal Government Employees

• Author: Grace Hall Saltzstein,Alan L. Saltzstein,Yuan Ting
• Date: 01 July 2001
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00049
• Published date: 01 July 2001

452 Public Administration Review •July/August 2001, Vol. 61, No. 4

Alan L. Saltzstein

California State University–Fullerton

Yuan Ting

California State University–Fullerton

Grace Hall Saltzstein

University of California–Riverside

Work-Family Balance and Job Satisfaction:

The Impact of Family-Friendly Policies on

Attitudes of Federal Government Employees

We use the 1991

Survey of Federal Government Employees

to test a theoretical framework

regarding the relationships between work and family demands, family-friendly policies, satis-

faction with work-family balance, and job satisfaction for diverse groups of employees with

different personal and family needs. We find that a variety of policies widely presumed to be

“family friendly” were used to varying degrees by disparate groups of federal employees. The

use of such policies had very diverse effects on both employee satisfaction with work-family

balance and job satisfaction, within and across various groups of similarly situated employees.

The assumptions underlying the provision of family-friendly policies and implications for the

organization are examined.

Introduction

Widely noted demographic and sociological changes

in the U.S. workforce, both public and private, over the

last 40 years have gradually but increasingly focused at-

tention on the need for workplace policies to assist em-

ployees in balancing work and family life. In previous

decades, a widely shared “work–family dichotomy,” based

on rigid and demanding workplace requirements with no

allowances for family demands, could hold sway largely

because men comprised the majority of the workforce;

most wives stayed at home to care for family responsi-

bilities and otherwise support their husbands’ careers

(Bruce and Reed 1994; Kanter 1977). In the years since,

however, that workforce has undergone a demographic

sea change, reducing the share of male workers with this

traditional support system to a minority and raising to

majority status a wide variety of “nontraditional” employ-

ees (women, the disabled, the elderly, students, and men

with family responsibilities) facing conflicts between rigid

work demands and personal or family needs and respon-

sibilities (Hudson Institute 1990).

Alan L. Saltzstein is a professor of political science and currently chair of the

division of political science and criminal justice at California State Univer-

sity–Fullerton. His published writings emphasize concerns for urban politics

and management. Recently he has written on the governance of Los Angeles

and the Orange County bankruptcy. Email: asaltzstein@fullerton.edu.

Yuan Ting is an associate professor of political science and director of the

master of public administration program at California State University–Ful-

lerton. His research focuses on human resource and organizational man-

agement. He has published in several journals. Email: yting@exchange.

fullerton.edu.

Grace Hall Saltzstein is a professor emeritus in the department of political

science at the University of California–Riverside. Her previously published re-

search includes work on a variety of topics regarding women and minorities in

the public-sector workforce and the implementation of public policies of par-

ticular interest to women and minorities. Email: gsaltzstein@earthlink.net.

Surveys over just the last 20 years (Families and Work

Institute 1998a, 4) show that the labor force has become

significantly “more balanced with respect to gender, older

on average … more racially and ethnically diverse.” Fur-

ther, they find (Families and Work Institute 1998a, 6) 85

percent of U.S. workers now “live with family members

and have immediate, day-to-day family responsibilities off

the job.” Forty-six percent are parents of children under

Work-Family Balance and Job Satisfaction 453

age 18 (20 percent of these are single parents); 67 percent

of married fathers now have employed partners (compared

to fewer than 50 percent in 1977); and 78 percent of all

married employees have working spouses (another signifi-

cant increase over 20 years ago). Twenty-five percent of

all workers had provided special assistance to someone 65

years or older during the year preceding the 1997 survey,

with 20 percent of all parents (the so-called “sandwich

generation”) assuming responsibility for both raising chil-

dren and caring for elderly relatives.

Employees in nontraditional households such as these

encounter great difficulties in balancing work and family

life. Working women face well-documented conflicts re-

sulting from their continuing role as primary caretakers

for their homes, children, and/or elderly parents (Higgins,

Duxbury, and Irving 1992; Hochschild 1989; Kelley and

Voydanoff 1985), while husbands in dual-career house-

holds face new workplace stresses as they have assumed

greater responsibility at home (Daddy Trap 1998; Fami-

lies and Work Institute 1998a; Ginsberg 1998;). Similarly,

older workers are often unwilling or physically unable to

meet rigid, full-time work schedules, and employed stu-

dents require flexible schedules or part-time work to

complement their school schedules. Other nontraditional

employees require similar flexibilities in the pursuit of

work–family balance. Yet, while more and more workers

are facing ever-greater family demands on their time, to-

tal working hours for all workers—and particularly for

women and fathers—have increased over the last 20 years,

and jobs themselves have become more demanding and

less secure (Daddy Trap 1998; Families and Work Insti-

tute 1998a; Vincola 1998). The “time bind” created by

the simultaneous rise in family and workplace pressures

has been evident for several years (Galinsky, Bond, and

Friedman 1996; Hochschild 1997; Schor 1991) and ap-

pears to be getting worse. More and more employees are

expressing significant to severe stress over workload and

worktime pressures (Brooks 1999; Families and Work

Institute 1998a), and nearly two-thirds of all workers have

expressed a preference for significantly fewer working

hours (Families and Work Institute 1998a, 8).

Though the United States has been reluctant to adopt

national policies requiring employers to limit working

hours or to provide benefits to help employees meet their

family and work responsibilities (Addison and Siebert

1991, 1994; Kamerman 1984; Steinberg and Cook 1988),

the obvious stresses on employees attributed to these and

looming demographic shifts (such as the prospect of mas-

sive baby boomer retirements in the face of a subsequently

much-smaller working-age cohort), coupled with the pres-

sures of global competition to hire and retain knowledge

workers, have done much to encourage employers to vol-

untarily address workers’ personal and family needs so as

to recruit and retain good employees, and thereby enhance

worker and organizational productivity. The federal gov-

ernment “introduced many of the initiatives that serve as

models for business” (Bruce and Reed 1994, 39) by devel-

oping a number of programs, policies, and practices such

as flexible, compressed, or part-time work schedules, the

ability to work at home on the clock, and employer-pro-

vided childcare assistance. These have come to be identi-

fied collectively as “work-family,” “family-friendly,” or,

as employers have expanded them to address the personal

needs of all employees (Ford Foundation 1997), “em-

ployee-friendly” policies. However, though the federal

government still led the private sector in provision of such

services as recently as the early 1990s, surveys showing

increased business interest in and provision of family-

friendly policies in recent years (Brooks 1999; Families

and Work Institute 1998b; Vincola 1998) raise serious ques-

tions about public employers’ ability to maintain a com-

petitive edge in meeting the needs of nontraditional em-

ployees in an increasingly tight labor market.

Recent surveys purporting to show flexible work sched-

ules and other family-friendly programs to be effective

tools in promoting job satisfaction, productivity, and com-

pany loyalty among workers seem certain to generate

continued support within the business community, but

assessments of the true extent and nature of the family-

friendly workplace are more elusive. Regular, large scale,

comparative surveys of the nature and array of family-

friendly policies provided by U.S. employers are few and

far between—the federal government conducts no regu-

lar, systematic surveys1 and private organizations and

consulting firms tend to survey dissimilar populations of

employers on an irregular basis. Disagreements over what

constitutes a single family-friendly policy or package of

such policies, and over how we are to define “family” for

purposes of either program eligibility or research studies

(Mitchell 1997), ensure the surveys that are conducted

are rarely entirely comparable.

For example, recent surveys of employers suggest that

the provision of family-friendly initiatives has increased,

with some form of flexible scheduling becoming one of

the most widely available policies (offered by 70 percent–

94 percent of firms surveyed), along with child care assis-

tance, the ability to work at home on the clock on occa-

sion, and some form of elder-care assistance (Families and

Work Institute 1998b; Mitchell 1997; Vincola 1998). Yet,

the best comparative study of changes in employee access

to various benefits (Families and Work Institute 1998a)

finds generally low levels of access and little or no change

between 1992 and 1998 in the availability of a number of

services, a notable exception being substantial increases

in the availability of elder-care services. Other research

has shown family-friendly benefits to be more readily avail-