Nowadays, increasing number of women is working in the social organizations and corporations. It is also true for married women as well as single ones. Married working females have more roles, experience more indesirable side-effects such as role conf...
Nowadays, increasing number of women is working in the social organizations and corporations. It is also true for married women as well as single ones. Married working females have more roles, experience more indesirable side-effects such as role conflict, pressures and overloaded work, and are placed far off the satisfaction of their lives. They face work-family conflict due to psychological pressure that they have to play two successful roles one at home and the other at work. This conflict cause the damages on their career commitment.
In this research, I concentrated on the relationship between the work-family conflict and career-commitment. I defined two forms of the conflicts, time-based conflict and strain-based conflict, and tried to find out which the Korean married women mostly suffer from and what effect there two forms of conflict have on career commitment. I also tried to find if achievement orientation and family-friendly benefits have an important role to control the relationship between the work-family conflict and career commitment.
The basic frame work used for this study is as follows:
The hypothesis of this study, on the basis of this model, are as follows:
Hypothesis 1: Work-family conflict will be negatively related to career commitment.
Hypothesis 1-1 : Time-based conflict will be negatively related to career commitment.
Hypothesis 1-2: strain-based conflict will be negatively related to career commitment.
Hypothesis 1-3: Time-based conflict will be more negatively related to career commitment than strain-based conflicts.
Hypothesis 2: An Achievement orientation will moderate the relationship with time-based conflicts, strain-based conflicts and career commitment.
Hypothesis 2-1: The relationship with time-based conflicts and career commitment will be moderated by an achievement orientation.
Hypothesis 2-2: The relationship with strain-based conflicts and career commitment will be moderated by an achievement orientation.
Hypothesis 3: Family-friendly benefits will moderate the relationship with time-based conflicts, strain-based conflicts and career commitment.
Hypothesis 3-1: The relationship with time-based conflicts and career commitment will be moderated by Family-friendly benefits.
Hypothesis 3-2: The relationship with strain-based conflicts and career commitment will be moderated by Family-friendly benefits.
I have distributed a questionnaire to married women working in domestic corporations(119) and foreign corporations(85), gathered and analyzed the information to get an enough evidence to prove the hypothesis given above.
The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the more seriously they recognize time-based conflict and strain-based conflict, the more possibly they fail to have career commitment. Time-based conflict has a greater effect on career commitment than strain-based conflict. This result shows that time-based conflict has the greatest effect on career of married women in Korean.
Second, the level of expectation of achievement controls the relationship among time-based conflict, strain-based conflict and career commitment. Women with higher expectation of achievement are less affected than those with lower expectation by a negative relationship between the conflict and career commitment. It can be understood that work-family conflict disturbs career commitment of married women but ones with higher expectation of achievement overcome the outer environment and commit the career seriously.
Third, the level of family-friendly benefits controls the relationship among time-based conflict, strain-based conflict and career commitment. It is shown that the case with higher level of family-friendly benefits has more positive relationship than the one with lower level. It may be said that flexible working hours, paid vacation system, program for children and family support decrease time-based conflict and strain-based conflict and encourage career commitment.
Forth, there seems no difference between work-family conflict and career commitment in both domestic and foreign corporations, but there are differences on expectation of achievement and effects on family-friendly benefits. Foreign corporations have higher academic background of their employees than domestic corporations, so that foreign corporations have shown higher expectations of achievement. What is more, domestic corporations are just at its starting level, but foreign corporations are a lot ahead.
The result of this research shows that corporations should work it out to decrease work-family conflict and to increase career commitment. In other words, in order to enlarge th efficiency of economic actions and increase of career development of married women and there must be family-friendly benefits such as paid vacation system for married women, shorter working hours or flexible working conditions.
However, in overall many domestic corporations have not sill realized how important family-friendly benefits and only a few of them understand the importance of it; they have not planned it out clearly yet. So that I though this research tried to question about the efficiency and remind others the importance of family-friendly benefits by examining the relationship between the conflict and career commitment. For this, the committee emphasizes that corporations need to plan out for the long run and try hard to accomplish themselves, family-friendly beneficial.