Can Job Control Reduce Work-Life Conflict? Testing for Time Management's Direct and Indirect Associations Using a Sample of Human Service Employees in New York City

Background and Purpose: Work-life conflict has a significant negative consequence on health and wellbeing of human service employees. The construct for example is positively associated with substance abuse, depression, intentions to quit, and high turnover in social service organizations. Accordingly, organizational scholars have emphasized time management interventions for reducing work life conflict. Conservation of resources (COR) theory states the employees who effectively regulate personal resources (i.e. time) enable their perceptions of control over one’s jobs in turn reducing work life conflict.

           Given that increased perception of control to perform one’s job duties, responsibilities, with effective time management would reduce work-life conflict. This influence of job control on time management - work-life conflict association would be consequential to examine among human service employees. Social work literature has overlooked the moderating influence of job control on time management’s relationship with work life conflict among human service employees. To addresses this gap in the social work literature this study tested the following three hypotheses:

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

2)    a significant negative main effect for job control on work-life conflict;

3)    a significant and negative time management – job control 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 were above the accepted cut off and one measure was below at (α =.64). Discriminant validity was established using maximum likelihood estimation with varimax rotation. For construct validity, all survey items loaded heavily onto their respective factors above .41. Procedures by Aiken and West¹² were utilized to test the three hypotheses in SPSS 20. Finally, except for three extreme outliers, no violations of OLS regression were noted.

Results: Support was observed for two hypotheses. Significant main effect was found for time management (β = .15, p < .05), and job control (β = -.13, n.s). The time management x job control interaction (β = -.26, p < .05) on the criterion measures was found to be significant. Further, the two-way time management x job control interaction term explained 6.2% of the variance in work life conflict, which is 13 times larger than a typical categorical interaction.

Conclusion and Implications: Research findings contribute to the social work literature by being the first known empirical work showing that job control moderates the relationship between time management and work life conflict. In order to reduce work life conflict, nonprofit human service agencies should facilitate perceptions of control in one’s job; which in turn would allow employees to better manage work-life conflict via effective time management practices. Future research would explore replication of these findings in other social work settings.