Family-Supportive Organization Perceptions, Multiple Dimensions of Work-Family Conflict, and Employee Satisfaction: A Test of Model across Five Samples

Work-family conflict (WFC) is recognized as a major issue affecting both individual employees and their employers. Preliminary research shows that the more employees perceive their work environment as family-supportive, the less they experience WFC (Allen, 2001). Moreover, there are theoretical and empirical reasons to expect that by reducing WFC, a family-supportive work environment would enhance employees’ satisfaction with their job, family, and life in general. In addition, despite the impressive body of research that has been devoted to WFC, there have been few studies that have assessed WFC as a multidimensional construct, other than those that distinguish between directions of conflict, namely work interference with family (WIF) versus family interference with work (FIW). Based primarily on Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) seminal theoretical work, Carlson, Kacmar, and Williams (2000) developed a six-dimensional measure of WFC designed to capture three forms of WFC (time-based, strain-based, and behavior-based) in each direction (WIF and FIW). Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bordeaux, and Brinley (2005) noted that more research on this multidimensional conceptualization of WFC would be valuable in providing a finer-grained understanding of this phenomenon.