Time Management's Relationship with Work-Life Conflict: Testing the Moderating Influence of Supervisor Support on a Sample of Nonprofit Employees in New York City

Background and Purpose:  Meta-analytic evidence indicates that work-life conflict has a substantial impact on employee health and well-being.  Specifically, work-life conflict is associated with work-related outcomes such as job strain, burnout, absenteeism, and intention to quit; and life-related outcomes such as depression, marital satisfaction, and substance abuse.  Accordingly, organizational scholars have identified and tested numerous individual-level interventions for mitigating the construct’s detrimental effects.  One intervention that has received nominal attention in the social work literature is time management.  Conservation of resource theory asserts that employees who effectively self-regulate scarce personal resources (e.g., their time) are more likely to experience favorable health and well-being outcomes.  Given that direct supervisors oversee the assignment and scheduling of an employee’s official job duties and responsibilities, their influence on her or his time management efforts could be substantial.  To date, no known published empirical studies have examined the moderating affect of supervisor support on the time management x work-life conflict relationship.  The present study addresses this gap in the social work research literature by testing the following hypotheses:

 H_1:there will be a significant main effect for time management on work-life conflict;

H_2: there will be a significant main effect for supervisor support on work-life conflict;

H_3: there will be a significant negative two-way interaction on work-life conflict.

Methods:  Following Dilman’s survey methods, two hundred and eighty employees working in a New York City nonprofit agency were surveyed (50% response rate).  Cronbach’s alphas for the study’s measures ranged from .61 to .88 and all survey items loaded heavily onto their respective factors above .40.  Discriminant validity was established using principle axis factoring estimation with varimax rotation.  Procedures by Aiken and West were used to test hypothesis 3.  Finally, except for three extreme outliners, no violations of OLS regression were noted.

 Results:  Support was observed for two of the three hypotheses.  A significant main effect for supervisor support (β = -.24, p < .05.) and a significant time management x supervisor support interaction (β = -.16, p< .05) on the criterion measures was found.  The two predictor variables jointly accounted for 9% of the variance in the criterion variable.  Further, the two-way time management x supervisor support interaction term explained 2.6% of the variance in work-life conflict which is 13 times larger than the typical categorical interaction.

Conclusion:  Study data make an important contribution to the social work literature by being the first known empirical work to identify a significant time management x supervisor support interaction on work and life conflict.  Research findings suggest that social service agencies that use time management training as an intervention for reducing the amount of conflict between an employee's workplace and personal life must also foster supervisor buy-in for these efforts to be effective.  Finally, organizational support is an area of future research.  If employees do not feel supported by their social service agency, these perceptions are likely to attenuate time management’s association with work-life conflict.