Work-Life Balance of Human Service Employees at an Emergency Department of a Non-Profit Hospital: Examining the Direct and Indirect Effects of Time Management and Instrumental Supervisor Support

Background and Purpose: Work-life conflict is high among frontline hospital employees^1,2,7. Non-profit hospital emergency human service employees experience high workload, emotional demands, and strain³. These challenging demands have unfavorable adverse effects on the health and wellbeing of employees. Despite uncovering the detrimental impact of the work and life stressors resulting in high work-life conflict, very few empirical studies have examined the how organizational resources could help reduce conflict and help in achieving a healthy work-life balance. There are inconsistent findings in meta-analytic studies on the role of support and work-life conflict^2,3,4. Conservation of Resources (COR)⁵theory posits that employees who are experiencing work or home-related stressors would acquire and maintain resources to reduce work-life conflict. The resource could be time, energy, money, and support which potentially mitigates the adverse effects of stressors. Scholars argue that supervisor support could act as a buffer against work and life stressors ^3,5,8. Therefore, we hypothesized the following: 1) There will be a negative and significant main effect of time management on work-life conflict, 2) There will be a negative and significant main effect of instrumental supervisory support on work-life conflict, 3) There will be a significant negative two-way interaction on work-life conflict.

Methods: The study surveyed 260 frontline employees working at an emergency department of a non-profit hospital located in New York City (55% response rate) during Spring 2019⁹. Cronbach’s alphas for the study measures were above the expected cut-off, and one measure was below at (α =.72)^12,14. Discriminant and construct validity was established using maximum likelihood estimation and varimax rotation. Aiken and West procedures were followed to test the hypotheses using the hierarchal moderated multiple regression analysis in SPSS 25^{10, 12,13}. No items cross-loaded on another factor above. Finally, except for one outlier, no violations of OLR regression were noted.

Results: Two hypotheses were found to be significant. Significant main effect was found for Instrumental supervisory support (β = -.193, p < .05), and time management (β = .137, n.s.). The interaction effect of time management and instrumental supervisory support (β = -.205, p < .05) on the outcome variable was significant. Further, this two-way interaction reported variance of 10.6% in the model, which is larger than a typical interaction effect.

Conclusion and Implications: These research findings contribute to the non-profit literature by being the first known empirical findings showing instrumental supervisory supports’ buffering effect on the relationship between time management and work-life conflict. Instrumental supervisory support includes providing direct tangible resources like time, which mitigate the harmful effects of strain. To reduce work-life conflict within hospitals, human services organizations must institute time management and instrumental supervisory support training. Employees who receive higher instrumental support from supervisors along with time management training would experience lowered levels of work-life conflict.