Brian DesRoches

University Honors with Honors in Business Administration

Major: Business Administration Minor: Leadership Studies

Supervisor: Jessica Magnus, Business

The Role of the Coworker in Minimizing Work-Family Conflict

Work-family conflict is an ongoing issue in corporate America today. With the retirement of the baby boomer generation, single-family households and dual-parent incomes, the current workforce is experiencing increased work-family conflict. With this, comes decreased organizational productivity, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job involvement and increased work and life stress, burnout, health problems, absenteeism and turnover. As a result, organizations are implementing several family-friendly measures to combat this epidemic (e.g., on-site child daycare, flextime, teleworking, etc.). Researchers have also begun to explore the role of the supervisor in mitigating conflict along the work/family interface. Results have shown supervisor emotional and tangible support can help reduce the negative effects of work-family conflict. However, an area yet to receive much research attention is that of the coworker. Specifically, coworkers have a unique opportunity to provide tangible assistance to others struggling with incidents of work-family conflict, as they often have a better idea of how to help one another meet work demands when they compete/conflict with family demands. Mesmer-Magnus and colleagues (2008) identified tangible forms of coworker family-friendly assistance that are found to help reduce work-family conflict. In this study, we build on their research by exploring what factors may predict when a coworker will provide these forms of assistance. We found coworkers will be more likely to offer tangible family-friendly assistance when the organization has family-supportive culture, when supervisors are family-supportive, when work groups are cohesive, when coworkers perceive higher levels of organizational justice with regards to the administration of family-friendly benefits at the organization, and when coworkers are higher in agreeableness. We discuss implications of these findings for future research and practice.