Research On The Impacts Of Worklife Conflict On The Wellbeing Of Civil Servants In Ghana

The realisation that human beings are the most important asset of any organisation has in recent time to given rise to the need to hire and retain the best human capital.Employee turn-over rate has increased owing to severe contradictory roles in the light of achieving a balance between personal roles at home and professional roles at work.These conflicting roles and its associated physical and psychological effects affect outcomes such as organizational commitment,job satisfaction,and turnover.In Ghana,Civil Servant have variously been criticised as apathetic and or unproductive as a result of common behaviours regarding punctuality,commitment and work output.This study explored the factors leading work-life conflict and its impacts on employees' wellbeing as well as the coping strategies adopted by Ghanaian Civil Servants to ensure work-life balance.Knowledge on these issues is key to the creation of awareness and thus to inform policy development on solution for the problems faced by Civil Servants in particular and Public Service employees in general.The findings of this study were deduced from the responses of 279 respondents from three randomly selected Civil Service Institutions in Ghana who actually participated in this study.The impacts of conflict were generally measured by the extent to which respondents' roles affect their physical and psychologically wellbeing.Concepts such as life satisfaction,family satisfaction as well as job satisfaction were used to ascertain employees' psychological wellbeing.This study confirmed the existence of incompatible roles in the home and work environments which resulted in both work to family and family to work conflicts.It was revealed that such conflicts impact differently on all Civil Servants irrespective of occupational class and that the impacts are influenced by the nature of roles,existing recognition system,family size,roles and orientation,work experience and qualification as well as personal outlook to work.Consequently,the respondents adopted different personal and organisation interventions as coping strategies to minimise the effects of work-life conflict.This study noted a significant difference in the use of personal coping interventions based on work experience such that Less Experienced Civil Servants were less likely to depend on personal intervention as compared to the More Experienced Civil Servant.This study also concluded that the dependence on organizational interventions was contingent on the Civil Service Institution where the employee was located.This notwithstanding,this study thus recommended specific intervention and feasible policies for individual employees and the Ghana civil service respectively to improve employee wellbeing and productivity.