What May Affect a Worker's Balance in Life?

There are individual differences that influence how people balance paid work and personal life. These include gender, personality, and coping strategies.

Man and woman have different balancing styles 

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In An Examination of the Implications and Costs of Work-Life Conflict in Canada (1999), Linda Duxbury and colleagues recognize the adverse effects of work-life stress on the overall productivity and wellness of employees. They observed that “…the variability in employee responses to work and family environments…” are affected by “fundamental individual differences”, specifically:

Gender

There are physiological and sociological bases for gender differences when responding to work-life issues. Women are more stressed than men due to their biological programming: “…wherein women tend to exhibit emotional symptoms…men tend to manifest physiological diseases…”

In Work-role Expectations and Work-Family Conflict: Gender Differences in Emotional Exhaustion (2004), Margaret Posig and Jill Kickul observe that among men work-family conflict (or the extent to which work demands lead to household tension) contributes to the indirect link between emotional exhaustion and work-role expectations. The same can be said for women; but job problems caused by family commitments often results in work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion.

Enilda Delgado and Maria Canabal’s Factors Associated with Negative Spillover from Job to Home Among Latinos in the United States (2006) also note how gender influences negative spillover (NS) of work demands to home life: “Working conditions, including hours worked, supervisor support, job pressure, and job autonomy significantly impact NS for both groups.”

According to Duxbury et al. (1999), the socialization process also affects gender-based responses towards work-life stress, with women’s role expectations containing “a higher level of stressors.” Within the domain of personal life (PL), this could mean expecting them to do chores and caregiving even after performing paid work (PW); while in the workplace, it is occupying jobs where autonomy is minimal. Thus, women’s varied response from men can also be attributed to differences in PW-PL stressors caused by gender stereotypes.

Personality and Coping Strategies

When faced with a taxing situation, everybody uses “adaptational techniques…to master a major psychological threat and its attendant negative feelings,” explains Ellen Galinsky of the Family and Work Institute. The coping style reflects an individual’s personality and “interpretation of potentially competing environmental demands.”

Herta Toth’s Gendered Dilemmas of the Work-Life Balance in Hungary (2005) offers a related finding. Through 30 interviews with male and female managers of a Budapest-based company, it was found out “that men and women have different perceptions of work-life balance and adopt different coping strategies to manage work and family commitments.”

Thus, apart from describing work-life conflict as highly perceptual, Duxbury and colleagues view coping behavior as the outcome of an employee’s decision to do (or not to do) something about the problem. Such manner of coping is shaped by her/his psychological make-up and cognitive assessment of the situation. However, they note that analyzing coping styles remains unexplored in this context.