The Differential Effect of Gender on the Way Conflict Between Work and Family Roles Affects Managers’ Reliance on Information Sources in Dealing With Significant Workplace Events

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2010

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Academy of Entrepreneurship

ISSN

1948-5638

Abstract

Prior studies have assessed the effects of work-family conflict on the individual. These studies have investigated how items such as emotions, job satisfaction and turnover are affected by this conflict. Few studies have investigated how this conflict may affect managerial behavior. This study investigates how this conflict may affect men and women who are managers differently in the way they utilize information in resolving significant workplace events. Hypotheses that managers that were women would exhibit less information seeking behavior in resolving these events were tested. These hypotheses were based on the premise that managers who were women would likely have a more demanding family role that would create more cognitive busyness and impede information search behavior. The study found that, contrary to expectations, most relationships between conflict and information search, measured by the perceived usefulness of various information sources, for both genders were positive and not negative. However, the perceived usefulness of these information sources was very different for men and women. Women had many more significant positive relationships between conflict and perceived usefulness of various information sources in resolving workplace events. The findings should be very useful for the entrepreneurial executive seeking optimal staffing for a wide range of growth initiatives under consideration by the organization. Many of these initiatives involve substantial commitments of time and effort by personnel particularly in the planning stages and initial operating periods. Entrepreneurial executives may be reluctant to assign management of these initiatives to men and women with significant family-related responsibilities. The data in this study that suggests a positive relationship between this conflict and collaboration with others in the organization does not support that reluctance. However, the entrepreneurial organization should also recognize that most individuals periodically encounter high demands of time and attention from their families. Therefore, entrepreneurial executives would be well advised to insist that the responsibilities for managing these entrepreneurial initiatives should be shared among more than one individual.

Conference Proceedings

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS