The Work-family Area: An Exploration Of Work-family Interface Among Chinese Employees

Discussions on work-family issues have become more prominent worldwide due to the increasing demands faced by individuals from the separate,and often conflicting,domains of work and home.Most of the studies performed in China have exclusively focused on workfamily conflict while ignoring the positive side of the work-family interface i.e.,work-family facilitation.To address this research need,the current study was designed to explore the factors that contribute to employees' work-family interface in China.The hypotheses of this dissertation were tested in three separate studies.In order to investigate the role of both organizational level and individual level HPWS in managing work-family interface of employees',I conducted study I.Data was collected from 68 HR managers and 605 employees of Chinese organizations.Using Hierarchical linear modelling to test this multilevel model,I demonstrated that:1)the combined effect of organizational level HPWS and proactive personality on employee experienced HPWS was significant when proactive personality was low;and 2)POS significantly mediates the relationship between employee experienced HPWS and work-family conflict;3)POS significantly mediates the relationship between employee experienced HPWS and work-family facilitation;4)the results showed that the interaction between organizational level HPWS and proactive personality indirectly affected work-family conflict sequentially through employee experienced HPWS and POS.But it does indirectly affect work-family facilitation sequentially through employee experienced HPWS and POS.Study II was designed to examine the role job autonomy and self-efficacy as mediators between HPWS and employees' work-family interface.Using data from 152 HR managers and 1324 employees,I found that:1)the high-performance work systems was positively associated with both job autonomy and self-efficacy;2)I observed that self-efficacy was an important mechanism to explain the relationship between HPWS and work-family facilitation and work-family conflict;3)I also observed that job autonomy mediated the relationship HPWS and work-family facilitation,but its presence was not significant between HPWS and work-family conflict.In Study III,data was collected from 1340 employees' working in Chinese organizations.Structural equation modeling(SEM)was applied to test the model of study I.This study was designed to study the role and value of WFF and WFC as mediators.Results of this study found:1)a significant positive relationship between perceived organizational support and work-family facilitation and significant negative relation between perceived organizational support and work-family conflict;2)results of this paper also indicated that work-family facilitation and work-family conflict partially mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and employee well-being.Finally,the results from these three studies were discussed in terms of their theoretical implications.As well as limitations were discussed in the last chapter of this dissertation.