Abstract
Many working adults manage joint work and family responsibilities and turn to supports offered at work and in the home to help manage these roles successfully. We review the current evidence on supports for improving work–life outcomes, including informal support from people at work and at home as well as formal organizational and national policies. Informal support is consistently moderately associated with better work–family experiences. Despite popular emphasis on formal policies, evidence for their effectiveness is relatively weak. We propose an agentic perspective to drive future understanding of how and when supports may be used to improve work–family management.
Juggling work and family responsibilities is a challenge for workers across the globe, giving rise to calls for supportive solutions. This review provides a summary of the extensive literature on support for managing work and family. We first define three primary experiences of work–family management. We then answer two important questions: What kind of informal and formal support helps employees manage work and family? And when is support most effective for managing work and family? Finally, we outline an overarching framework that connects formal and informal supports and conclude with suggestions for an agentic and family-inclusive path forward to better understand how individuals shape their own supportive landscapes.
Work–Family Management
We consider support for three experiences typically used to describe the ways people combine work and family: work–family conflict, work–family enrichment, and work–family balance. Work–family conflict occurs when the demands of one domain interfere with the ability to meet demands of the alternative domain (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985). For example, a betrothed worker may be planning a wedding during work time, thereby making it difficult to focus on work goals. Work–family conflict is bidirectional; work can interfere with family, and family can interfere with work. Work–family enrichment occurs when resources from one domain, such as knowledge, skill, or emotions, improve performance in the alternative domain (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006). For example, news of a promotion may put a worker in a good mood, which enriches the conversations with the worker’s spouse that evening. Work–family enrichment is also bidirectional; work can enrich family, and family can enrich work. Work–family balance is defined as, employees’ evaluation of the favorability of their combination of work and nonwork roles, arising from the degree to which their affective experiences and their perceived involvement and effectiveness in work and nonwork roles are commensurate with the value they attach to these roles. (Casper, Vaziri, Wayne, DeHauw, & Greenhaus, 2018, p. 197)
For example, workers who feels balanced may perceive that they are spending the right amount of time in their work and family roles given their personal values. Although all three concepts are discussed, most extant literature focuses on work–family conflict.
What kind of support helps employees manage work and family?
Informal support
Informal supports are psychological or material resources provided through social relationships. Table 1 displays the different forms, types, and sources of support as well as support specific to work–family needs. Supportive behaviors directly reduce the difficulty of managing work and family (work–family conflict) and improve work–family balance and work–family enrichment. Alternatively, supportive behaviors can indirectly improve work–family management by creating the feeling of being supported (e.g., French, Dumani, Allen, & Shockley, 2018).
Support Concepts and Definitions Used in the Work–Family Literature
Meta-analyses that combine results across multiple studies suggest that supportive relationships are consistently associated with lower work–family conflict (French et al., 2018; Kossek, Pichler, Bodner, & Hammer, 2011) and higher work–family enrichment (Lapierre et al., 2018). Figure 1 shows the most up-to-date meta-analytic correlations between support and work–family conflict and between support and work–family enrichment. No current meta-analyses have focused on the relationship between social support and work–family balance, although individual studies show positive associations (e.g., Greenhaus, Ziegert, & Allen, 2012).
Uncorrected absolute meta-analytic correlations between support type and work-to-family conflict, family-to-work conflict, work-to-family enrichment, and family-to-work enrichment. Support type consisted of informal support at work (organizational support, supervisor support, leader–member exchange, coworker support; average number of studies per correlation = 38), formal support at work (flexplace availability and use, flextime availability and use, dependent-care availability and use, family-friendly policies aggregate; average number of studies per correlation = 13), and informal family support (family support, spouse support; average number of studies per correlation = 32). Meta-analytic correlations were extracted from studies by Allen, Johnson, Kiburz, and Shockley (2013); Butts, Casper, and Yang (2013); French, Dumani, Allen, and Shockley (2018); Lapierre et al. (2018); and Litano, Major, Landers, Streets, and Bass (2016). Error bars represent standard deviations. No standard deviation was reported by Butts et al. (2013) for dependent-care availability and use.
Although evidence suggests that support is generally beneficial for work–family outcomes, the strength of the relationship between support and work–family experiences depends on who is providing support. Social support tends to be most strongly related to work–family conflict when it comes from the domain in which conflict or enrichment originates. For example, organizational perceptions and supervisor support are most strongly associated with reduced work-to-family conflict and increased work-to-family enrichment. Likewise, support from family tends to be most strongly associated with family-to-work enrichment. The pattern deviates with family-to-work conflict, for which effect sizes are of similar magnitude for work and family support (French et al., 2018; Lapierre et al., 2018). In terms of sources of support within each domain, supervisors are regarded as the most important source of work support, likely because of the power and discretion they hold over employees’ demands and rewards (Hammer, Kossek, Yragui, Bodner, & Hanson, 2009). On the family side, spouses are by far the most commonly studied source of support, although effect sizes for spouses are comparable with those found for general family support. Lastly, supports that are specifically designed to help juggle work and family tend to be more strongly associated with work–family conflict and work–family enrichment compared with generic support (e.g., sharing ideas or advice; Kossek et al., 2011; Lapierre et al., 2018).
Formal support
Formal supports are policies that support employees in the form of time, services, or finance (Butts, Casper, & Yang, 2013; see Table 1 for forms, types, and sources of formal support). The mere offering of formal policies may signal organizational concern for employees as a form of support, and the use of policies offers support in terms of granting employees additional time or increased control over work and family demands (Allen & Shockley, 2009).
Meta-analyses have investigated workplace flexibility policy and dependent-care policy availability and use in relation to work-to-family conflict (Allen, Johnson, Kiburz, & Shockley, 2013; Butts et al., 2013). The results are somewhat inconsistent given that only flexplace use, flextime availability, availability of dependent-care policy, and use of dependent-care policy are associated with less work-to-family conflict. There are no significant meta-analytic associations between work-to-family conflict and flexplace availability or flextime use. Family-to-work conflict is not significantly associated with flexibility use or availability. With regard to enrichment, Lapierre et al. (2018) examined a bundle variable (a combination of the availability and use of policies for workplace flexibility and dependent-care support) and found that it related positively to both work-to-family and family-to-work enrichment (Lapierre et al., 2018). Overall, even in cases in which effect sizes were significant, they were negligible to small (rs = .01–.13; see Fig. 1).
Some researchers have conjectured why relationships between formal supports and work–family outcomes are not stronger. Allen et al. (2013) posited that flexibility may increase family demands. For example, the spouse with the more flexible job may be the one who takes responsibility for picking up children or doing more housework. They also argued that flexibility increases choices and can therefore create challenges with self-regulation, making it difficult to focus on present work or family tasks. Employees may also experience negative career repercussions, particularly when use is attributed to personal as opposed to productivity motives (Leslie, Manchester, Park, & Mehng, 2012). These added stressors may further assuage the efficacy of programs in supporting work–family needs. Lastly, the correlations may appear artificially low because the people with the highest work–family conflict (or lowest work–family balance) are most likely to use formal policies. To date, the literature lacks a substantial number of studies with designs that could help disentangle this (i.e., experimental, quasiexperimental, or longitudinal designs). The three known studies with a quasiexperimental design showed mixed results. Two found no significant differences in the experimental and control group—flextime intervention in relation to work interference with personal life (Dunham, Pierce, & Castañeda, 1987); remote-work intervention in relation to work–life balance (Hill, Miller, Weiner, & Colihan, 1998)—and one found lower negative work–home spillover in the experimental group (Results Only Work Environment intervention; Moen, Kelly, Tranby, & Huang, 2011).
Beyond the organization, many countries have national policies aimed at facilitating work–family management. Policies include labor laws, such as working-hour limits and vacation-time requirements; paid family leave; the right to request part-time employment; and state child-care subsidies (Ollier-Malaterre & Foucreault, 2017). Most research has focused on parental leave, which varies considerably across countries in terms of length of leave, percentage of salary paid during leave, and flexibility in when leave is used, among other factors (for a review, see Raub et al., 2018). Findings regarding national policies are mixed. For example, Allen et al. (2014) found that longer paid parental leave was associated with lower work-to-family conflict but not family-to-work conflict, whereas Ruppanner (2013) found that longer parental leave was associated with lower family-to-work conflict but not work-to-family conflict. Additional studies found no association between parental leave and work–family conflict (e.g., Annink, Den Dulk, & Steijn, 2016). Overall, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the association between national policies and work–family conflict. The source of study discrepancies is unknown because of the myriad factors that vary across these studies (e.g., countries included and way policies are operationalized).
When and for whom is support most effective for managing work and family?
Both informal and formal supports tend to be most strongly associated with work–family management when the environment allows and promotes the use of supportive resources. For example, Greenhaus et al. (2012) found that supervisor support is more strongly related to work–family balance when individuals perceive that their organization overall is family supportive. French and Agars (2018) found that managerial support was more weakly related to work–family conflict and work–family enrichment in a low-income sample compared with a higher-income sample. Workers in poverty may not have the context needed to successfully use supportive resources, such as sufficient income to afford a missed day of work. Workers are also more likely to use formal family-friendly policies when their organizations and supervisors are supportive of family needs (e.g., Allen, 2001; Allen & Shockley, 2009), as the number of policies increases (Butts et al., 2013), and when employees feel they can use policies without negative career consequences (Thompson, Beauvais, & Lyness, 1999). Further, national formal policies tend to be more strongly related to work–family conflict as informal work support increases (e.g., Allen et al., 2014).
Informal and formal supports also tend to be most strongly related to the work–family interface when support is needed. For example, researchers have found that supportive policies show a stronger association with work–family conflict for people with greater family responsibilities (e.g., Allen et al., 2013; Shockley & Allen, 2007). Similarly, one intervention study found that a family-specific supervisor-support training intervention decreased work–family conflict only for participants who reported high levels of work–family conflict before the intervention (Hammer, Kossek, Anger, Bodner, & Zimmerman, 2011). Gender differences are also framed using a needs perspective. Acknowledging traditional gender roles and contemporary data on the division of labor, some researchers suggest that work and family support is more greatly needed or useful for women, who take on more child-care and household labor, compared with men (e.g., Blanch & Aluja, 2012). However, results across studies are mixed for both informal and formal supports, suggesting no clear gender differences (e.g., Allen et al., 2013; Anderson, Coffey, & Byerly, 2002). These individual-level patterns also generalize on a broader cultural scale. Recent cross-national work suggests that work support is most strongly associated with work-to-family conflict in cultures that are likely to perceive support as needed or useful, such as individualistic, assertive, high-unemployment (French et al., 2018), and low-power-distance countries (Litano, Major, Landers, Streets, & Bass, 2016).
In sum, prior work suggests that there is a positive association between support and successful work–family management. This positive association occurs through two primary pathways, displayed in Figure 2. First, use of available informal and formal supports can provide instrumental help to directly navigate the challenges of navigating work and family responsibilities on a day-to-day basis (path A). Additionally, formal supportive policies and informal supportive behaviors signal work–family-friendly values that foster perceptions of being supported, which in turn affect work–family conflict, work–family enrichment, and work–family balance (paths B and C). We also have a clear understanding of moderating factors suggesting that support is most effective when the environment is perceived as supportive (path D) and when support is needed (paths E and F).
Depiction of the connections between formal and informal supports and work–family-management experiences. Work support originates in the work domain, and family support originates in the family domain. Boxes with thick borders highlight concepts that have received little empirical or theoretical attention and areas of opportunity for future research. See the text for explanations of each path label.
Moving Forward
The theory and literature reviewed here largely place employees as passive recipients of support. Thus, the implicit assumption is that support is always wanted, used, or helpful (see work on the use of formal organizational support as an exception; e.g., Allen et al., 2013). However, there may be situations in which informal support is not wanted or used. For example, some employees who prefer to separate work from family may see a manager’s family-supportive behaviors as intrusive or as providing unwanted preferential treatment that may breed coworker resentment (Parker & Allen, 2001). In other cases, a person may report that their spouse’s provided support is not used because of personal preferences (e.g., a spouse who is willing to provide instrumental support in cooking dinner but is a lousy cook).
We suggest reframing support as an agentic process to more fully understand how and when supports may be used to promote successful work–family management (see Fig. 2). This step forward requires measures that separate informal support availability, behaviors, and use as well as measures and methods that can capture the process of needing (path E), soliciting (paths G and H), developing perceptions (paths B and I), and using support (paths L and A).
Because support is almost exclusively framed as an antecedent to work–family management, little attention has been given to the possibility that work–family experiences elicit support perceptions and use. For example, the source-attribution perspective suggests that individuals project emotions onto the originating domain of their work–family experience (Shockley & Singla, 2011). For example, after experiencing work-to-family enrichment, a person may then credit work with this experience and develop a sense of work support (path I). Additionally, asking questions regarding a specific event (e.g., a discrete episode of work–family conflict) can help one better understand acute processes, emotions, and cognition that occurred during the episode (Maertz & Boyar, 2011). By taking a deep dive into a specific work–family conflict event using the experience sampling methodology, researchers can address questions such as how often individuals actually draw on supportive resources and how individuals decide whom and how to reach out, accept, and use support when a work–family conflict event occurs (Fig. 2, path H). Recent research has started to answer such questions; French and Allen (2018) found that individuals did not ask for support in approximately 75% of all episodes of work–family conflict experienced over 3 days. When individuals did reach out for support, spouses were overwhelmingly the most common source.
In this same vein, research on antecedents to support enactment could shed additional light on agentic aspects (Fig. 2, path G). Drawing from the social-networks literature, it would be fruitful to examine the strength of employees’ network ties and the size of their networks to determine whom they approach for support. It may be that those with larger networks rely on many different people or that the size of the network does not matter, and people tend to gravitate toward just a few key support providers. Individual differences may also affect support actions. For example, attachment style predicts support; people with secure attachments form stable and trusting relationships conducive to asking for and receiving support (e.g., Baldwin, 1992). Personality variables may have relevance; proactive workers may be likely to notice situations in which they may need support, or those who are agreeable may be more likely to accept offered support. Finally, situational constraints (factors that inhibit meeting demands) and pressures (factors that increase perceived importance or obligation to meet demands) may play a role. For example, employees who feels pressured to make it on time to their child’s school play may be more likely to ask for coworker help when it is clear they may not finish their work in time. Similarly, an impending and immovable work deadline may constrain a supervisor’s ability to provide or allow flexible work–family-friendly solutions for employees.
Despite commonalities, informal and formal supports are typically studied in isolation (Kelly et al., 2008). The siloed research on formal and informal supports limits our ability to understand how and when workers actually use formal supports as support givers or support receivers. Moreover, the weak associations between formal supports and work–family management may be due to formal supports being distal, impacting work–family management through a chain of support processes. Moving forward, it is important to recognize that informal and formal supports are interconnected. We posit that the presence of formal supports may condone or promote supportive behaviors from support givers (Fig. 2, paths J and K) and subsequent informal support use (path L).
Moreover, the vast majority of research focuses on support from work and neglects family support—a large oversight given that many individuals weigh family heavily when making decisions regarding work (e.g., Greenhaus & Powell, 2012). Similarly, stakeholders with lower legitimate power (e.g., subordinates, clients, children, child-care providers) have received little attention despite their potential to significantly shape work–family experiences (e.g., Major, Cardenas, & Allard, 2004).
Evidence for the paths in Figure 2 is mostly based on cross-sectional research. As an exception, some intervention research has investigated family-supportive supervisor training in relation to work–family conflict (e.g., Hammer et al., 2011). Family-supportive supervision interventions teach supervisors supportive behavior and use behavior monitoring to track supportive behavior provision. Results show that supportive supervision interventions have the potential to improve occupational health and well-being for workers and their family members (e.g., Hammer, Wan, Brockwood, Bodner, & Mohr, 2019), although evidence that supervisor support improves work–family conflict, work–family enrichment, or work–family balance is still tentative. We echo previous calls to increase the use of designs that can disentangle causal ordering and challenge our current understanding of how support develops and why support is helpful for managing work and family (Kelly et al., 2008).
Conclusion
Supports help individuals to manage their work and family responsibilities, and it is clear that support efficacy depends on the types of supports offered, the source of support, and factors that promote the use of supportive resources and increase the need for support. We hope the ideas here are instrumental in moving us forward to a more sophisticated understanding of when and how supportive policies, givers, and receivers can work in tandem to foster successful work–family management.
Recommended Reading
Allen, T. D., Golden, T. D., & Shockley, K. M. (2015). How effective is telecommuting? Assessing the status of our scientific findings. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16, 40–68. A comprehensive review of the empirical evidence on telecommuting effectiveness.
Carlson, D. S., & Perrewé, P. L. (1999). The role of social support in the stressor-strain relationship: An examination of work-family conflict. Journal of Management, 25, 513–540. An empirical study in which the theoretical role of social support is reviewed and tested in relation to work–family conflict.
French, K. A., Dumani, S., Allen, T. D., & Shockley, K. M. (2018). (See References). A comprehensive meta-analysis of informal support in relation to work–family conflict across the globe.
Kelly, E. L., Kossek, E. E., Hammer, L. B., Durham, M., Bray, J., Chermack, K., . . . Kaskubar, D. (2008). (See References). A review and set of recommended future directions for formal work–family policies.
Kelly, E. L., Moen, P., Oakes, J. M., Fan, W., Okechukwu, C., Davis, K. D., . . . Casper, L. M. (2014). Changing work and work-family conflict: Evidence from the work, family, and health network. American Sociological Review, 79, 485–516. An intervention study examining the effect of control and support on work–family conflict.
