부서의 업무과정특성과 가족친화분위기가 듀얼아젠다에 미치는 영향

초록

As female labor market grows and dual income families increase, work-family balance is becoming a very important issue for corporate organizations. Dual agenda perspective proposes that the concern for work-family balance can enhance workplace effectiveness as it exposes ineffective work practices and aims to correct them. From this dual agenda perspective, we examined the effects that work process routines and family friendly atmosphere within a department have on an employees’ perception of work-family conflict and on departmental effectiveness. To measure the departmental effectiveness, we used three sub-constructs of team effectiveness: perceived performance of the department, departmental commitment, and satisfaction about the department. Our hypotheses are as follows. Negative work process routines would increase the work-family conflict felt by employees (Hypothesis 1) and lower the departmental effectiveness (Hypothesis 2). Family-friendly atmosphere in the department will decrease employee’s work-family conflict (Hypothesis 3), while heighten the departmental effectiveness (Hypothesis 4). We also suggested that these relationships may differ by gender and the level of career aspiration. In order to understand the link between work-family conflict and organizational effectiveness, we conducted participant observation at a PR department in a local government organization for 6 weeks from October to November, 2005. Through time logs, shadowing and interviews, we identified the characteristics of work process routine that has implication for both employee’s work-family conflict and departmental effectiveness. At the end of our participant observation, we delivered the questionnaire with four major constructs of our study (work process routine, family-friendly atmosphere, work-family conflict, and departmental effectiveness) to every employee of the organization. Among the 700 employees who received the questionnaire, 297 returned it, showing 42% of response rate. The final sample is composed of 289 respondents. The demographic characteristics of this sample are as follows: 65% were male employees, 81% were married, 53% belong to dual income family, 48% belonged to the 7th rank within the organization, and 74% is in the age group of between 30 and 50. Data were analyzed with the structural equation modeling using AMOS 4.0. In our model, we set the work process routine and family-friendly atmosphere as exogenous variables and work-family conflict and departmental effectiveness as endogenous variables. Since there was a correlation of .49 between work process routine and family friendly atmosphere, we incorporated the correlation between the two exogenous variables into our model. Our results show that positive work process routines did not have significant effect on reducing employees’ work-family conflict, rejecting Hypothesis 1. However, positive work process routines did increase all three dimensions of the perceived effectiveness of the department, supporting Hypothesis 2. In other words, employees working in the department with positive routines seem to perceive their departmental performance to be relatively high. They are also more committed to and satisfied with their department. As for the family-friendly atmosphere, it neither reduced the work family conflicts of employees nor increased the departmental effectiveness, rejecting both Hypothesis 3 and 4. On the contrary, we found that family-friendly atmosphere actually lowered the perceived departmental effectiveness. We also examined whether gender and employee’s career aspiration moderate the relationship among four major constructs. The result showed that neither gender nor individual career aspiration showed any significant moderating effect. To summarize, our findings showed that department characteristics, such as work process routines and family friendly atmosphere, had limited impact on employee’s work-family conflict. Moreover, work process routine and family-friendly atmosphere had contradictory effect on workplace effectiveness, despite the fact that these two variables were positively correlated. Results of our study need to be interpreted carefully, since our findings are counter to the widely accepted belief that family-friendly culture could actually improve the organizational effectiveness. Several factors may contribute to our findings. First of all, departmental effectiveness was measured “subjectively,” rather than “objectively,” in our study. In comparing our results with other studies that are more “objective,” there is a danger of comparing, say, apples and oranges, since each department may have different performance criteria to begin with. The limitation points to the need to adopt the Collaborative Interactive Action Research (CIAR) on conducting dual agenda research. CIAR allows researchers to use the tailor-made performance measure before and after family-friendly practices are introduced within the work unit, and thus can overcome the issue of comparability. The negative relationship between family-friendly atmosphere and perceived organizational effectiveness may be attributed to the negative correlation of family-friendly atmosphere and the status of the department within the organization. That is, the more important the department is, the higher the workload and the perceived effectiveness of the department. It is important to note, however, that the existence of various degrees of family-friendly atmosphere across the department could actually help employees to ease out the work-family conflict over their career development, if not in a day-to-day working environment. For example, employees who are experiencing high demand from both work and family could opt to work in the department with family-friendly atmosphere even if the department may not enjoy high prestige. They could later move to more demanding departments with less family-friendly atmosphere, when their work-family situation has eased. In fact, several interviewees answered that it was how they managed their work-family balance at the organization. The main contribution of our study is that we have suggested the framework for considering both work-family conflict and workplace effectiveness at the same time. Our study found that work process routine and family-friendly atmosphere did not affect employees’ work-family conflict, yet it revealed that work process routines do affect perceived workplace effectiveness. While our results imply that dual agenda perspective holds promise for future research, they also suggest a need for more qualitative methodology, such as Collaborative Interactive Action Research.

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