Coping with Work-Family Conflict: Integrating Individual and Organizational Perspectives

Publisher Summary This chapter adopts a comprehensive perspective on coping with work–family conflict (WFC) and undertakes three complementary goals: to delineate the range of coping strategies for dealing with WFC among employed parents and to test their effectiveness; to identify organizational practices aimed at redesigning work and work roles for handling WFC and to probe their effectiveness; and to propose models for depicting the joint effects of individual and organizational coping strategies in easing work–family conflict. It starts by describing the changing social context affecting the burgeoning interest in coping with WFC and reviews the three main perspectives for examining this issue. It reviews the literature on coping with work–family conflict and then it discusses a number of typologies pertaining to the strategies that individuals use to cope with work–family conflict. Next, it describes how workplace family-friendly policies relate to coping with work–family conflict. Following this, it proposes three models that depict different ways of integrating the individual and organizational perspectives: the compensatory model, the complementary model, and the spiral model. The chapter concludes with a discussion of recurring themes in the literature, and the identification of problems with the current perspective on coping with WFC. Specific suggestions for developing an integrative model combining the individual and organizational perspectives for coping, future research, and managerial implications are also made.