Testing Organizational Support's Moderating Influence on Time Management's Association with Work-Life Conflict

               Background and Purpose: Meta analytic studies show that work-life conflict has a negative impact on employee health and well-being. For example, work-life conflict (WLC) is positively associated with depression, cardiovascular diseases, burnout, and substance abuse. Accordingly, occupational health scholars have investigated individual level interventions (e.g., time management) that ameliorate work-life conflict’s detrimental effects. One work-life conflict intervention that has received little attention in the social work literature is time management. Conservation of resources theory states that employees who effectively regulate their personal resources (i.e., their time) should experience positive health and wellbeing outcomes.

Because organizational policies help or hinder time management practices, the constructs should have a meaningful influence on the time management-work life conflict association. To date, no empirical studies have examined the moderating influence of organizational support on the time management-work-life conflict association, especially among human service employees. The present study addresses this gap in the social work research literature by testing the following three hypotheses:

1)    a significant negative main effect for time management on work-life conflict;

2)    a significant negative main effect for organizational support on work-life conflict;

3)    a significant negative time management - organizational support interaction on work-life conflict.

Methods: This study surveyed 253 employees working in a nonprofit human service agency located in New York City (53% response rate).  Cronbach’s alphas for the study’s measures ranged from .64 to .87.  For construct validity, all survey items loaded heavily onto their respective factors above .41. Discriminant validity was established using maximum likelihood estimation with varimax rotation.  Procedures by Aiken and West were utilized to test the hypothesized interaction. Finally, except for two extreme outliers, no violations of OLR regression were noted.

Results: Support was observed for only one of the three hypotheses.  The two-way time management x organizational support interaction (β = -.17, p < .05) on the criterion measures was significant. Further, the interaction term explained 3.4% of the variance in work life conflict, which is 10 times larger than a typical two-way categorical interaction.

Conclusion and Implications: Research findings contribute to the social work literature by being the first known empirical study showing that organizational support moderates the relationship between time management and work life conflict. Supportive organizational policies that facilitate effective time management practices appear to buffer the negative effect of work-life conflict on non-profit employees. In order to reduce work life conflict, nonprofit human service agencies should institute organizational policies that facilitate effective time management practices.