Influence Of Flexibility On Family-Work- Conflict:the Moderating Role Of Family- Flexibility-Willingness

The Non-profit Organizations are booming up in China in this decades, it seems that we enter the fast growing stage after the awakening of social welfare consciousness. The Non-profit Organization belongs to the third department, as one of the three pillars in constructing a modern society as the corporations and governments do. The people who work in this field, including non-profits organization employees and social workers are all facing a roaring demand from the society but lack of enough support at the same time. The individual employees though get support from the family, still would encounter the shortage of resources they have, so that it turns out difficult for them to transfer their resources between the family and work domain, which leads to conflict between the Family and Work relationships.Clark(2000) and Ashforth(2000) has introduced the boundary theory into the research and study of Work-Family interface. It changes our focus to the tension of the role’s change, the intentions of the individuals and the interactions to understand the relationship between work and family in a deeper and finer level.Boundary flexibility is a very important variable that influence work family relationship, it is actually one’s subjective perception of flexibility when changing his roles in the domain. The boundary willingness thus reflects the people’s preference of integrating or switching between work and family domain, when one tends to increase the flexibility of boundary willingness, his boundary becomes fuzzy and elastic, so that it further accelerates the transformation of the roles between different areas in both perceptual and physical ways. Therefore, we would like to focus on the influence that boundary flexibility has on work family conflict, and see what kind of important role the boundary willingness played in the work family conflict when under the premise of limited resources.Our research was based on the theory of boundary; we would like to check out the possibilities if the boundary willingness can moderate work-family conflict, hoping to give useful advice to the people work in the non-profit organizations on how to reduce the conflict of work and family; so that both the organization and employees would feel harmony and produce more effectively. Our study is conducted interviews and questionnaires; we mainly look at three aspects to explore.Study 1:Analysis of present work and family relationship situation of employees in non-profit organizations. We conduct 8 interviews to the employees working in the non-profit organization, in which there is a male staff, others are all female. We also interviewed 3 family members of them. The interview is to open a discussion on work and family situations they felt, to understand the pressure and support they got, the family support and family feedback that as an experience to them, and the majority response a conflict. We found that the non-profit organization’s employees face the great pressure from work, also found that individuals get a lot of support in the family, including the economic and emotional support, but the family members as the boundary maintainers reports dissatisfaction on the allocation of resource that the individuals put, at the same time the individuals feel conflict in two domains, result into guilty feeling,it is quite obvious that work family conflict exist.Study 2:The analysis of the situation of Boundary Flexibility and Boundary Willingness of Work-Family relationship for employees working in non-profit organizations. We use the questionnaire to explore if family support related to family boundary flexibility; By the result of hierarchical regression analysis, we found that the positive correlation of family support and family border flexibility, the former can predict the latter. According to the 231 questionnaires issued, we conducted a survey to employees working in non-profit organizations (public institutions staffs and social workers) in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, we found aht the family boundary flexibility is significantly higher than that of work boundary flexibility, and the family boundary willingness is higher than the work boundary willingness as well.Study 3:The effects of work family flexibility has taken on to the work family conflict to those employees of non-profit organization; the moderating role that the boundary willingness has played. Return to work and family boundary flexibility and work family bidirectional conflict, we found it obvious that family boundary flexibility’s impact on work family bidirectional conflict. The family boundary wiliness has played a significant role of moderating the relationship; to those who have high willingness, family boundary flexibility has more significant impact on the work family bidirectional conflict.