Work-life balance practices and organizational commitment of academics at a Chilean University

Abstract

Human resource policies and practices that improve work conditions, as well as employee adaptation to modern life demands affect the institution’s valuation within the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) framework. Among these measures, workfamily conciliation is an important factor. The aim of this study is to address one of the central CSR challenges in Human Resources Management (HRM): practices that allow work-family conciliation and their relationship with organizational commitment to the workplace. A descriptive, correlational, cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the relationship between the importance attributed to work-family conciliation measures and the multidimensional construct of organizational commitment. A questionnaire was applied to 82 faculty professors from different Chilean universities in order to assess labor conciliation measures and worker
commitment using Meyer & Allen methods (1991). The results showed that there is a positive and significant correlation between affective and normative commitment and measures for “family integration”. Continuance commitment is positively and significantly related to “economic support” measures and “flexible hours arrangement  to fulfill family responsibilities” offered by the institution. The results showed that a high valuation of these measures is positively related to commitment. Therefore, the formulation, implementation and communication of business labor conciliation policies is crucial since they produce concrete effects on organizational commitment. Future studies should focus on establishing which work-family conciliation measures
most accurately represent an organizational commitment in order to effectively design specific programs that best respond to the workers’ needs.