The adoption of life balance innovations: Two perspectives

Research has documented the consequences of work-family conflict for individuals and the implications for employers. Many life balance innovations have been developed to help ameliorate this conflict by either easing time constraints or by helping employees fulfill outside obligations. This paper presents human capital theory hypotheses as a way of explaining why companies will invest differently in life balance innovations. In the absence of human capital predictors of innovation adoption, institutional theory was tested as an alternative explanation of why some companies choose to invest in life balance innovations.; To test these theories, surveys were mailed to 950 human resource executives and were returned in a usable form by 167 respondents. This survey information along with archival company information was entered into a regression with the number of innovations adopted as the dependent variable. The independent variables explained nearly a third of the possible variance in innovation adoption (R{dollar}sp2{dollar} =.32). This adoption was explained by the control variable company size, as well as by two human capital variables: training expenditures and labor intensity. When alternative dependent variables were used--some support for other human capital variables including education and average employee age was found. In no model, were any of the institutional hypotheses supported. Implications of these results for theory development are presented including post hoc analyses on life balance opinion leaders. Finally, study limitations, and recommendations for future research in both human capital theory and life balance innovations are discussed.