This study investigates the effects of work–life balance (WLB) on several individual outcomes across cultures. Using a sample of 1416 employees from seven distinct populations – Malaysian, Chinese, New Zealand Maori, New Zealand European, Spanish, French, and Italian – SEM analysis showed that WLB was positively related to job and life satisfaction and negatively related to anxiety and depression across the seven cultures. Individualism/collectivism and gender egalitarianism moderated these relationships. High levels of WLB were more positively associated with job and life satisfaction for individuals in individualistic cultures, compared with individuals in collectivistic cultures. High levels of WLB were more positively associated with job and life satisfaction and more negatively associated with anxiety for individuals in gender egalitarian cultures. Overall, we find strong support for WLB being beneficial for employees from various cultures and for culture as a moderator of these relationships.
Work–life balance (WLB) is a central concern in everyday discourses (Greenhaus and Allen, 2011, Greenhaus et al., 2003, Guest, 2002, Kossek et al., 2014 and Maertz and Boyar, 2011). However, despite its popularity, WLB remains one of the least studied concepts in work–life research (Greenhaus & Allen, 2011). Valcour (2007) noted that it is “a concept whose popular usage has outplaced its theoretical development” (p. 1513). A reason for this is the field's struggle to agree on a common definition of WLB (Greenhaus & Allen, 2011). Another reason is that research on the positive individual outcomes of WLB has been relatively slow to accumulate (Greenhaus and Allen, 2011 and Maertz and Boyar, 2011). In addition, most of the current studies focus on work–family balance, without considering individuals' broader lives including community, leisure, church, sport and other activities (Hall, Kossek, Briscoe, Pichler, & Lee, 2013). In this study we work with a relatively consensual definition of WLB as being an individual's assessment of how well her or his multiple life roles are balanced (e.g. Greenhaus and Allen, 2011, Haar, 2013 and Kossek et al., 2014). We aim to contribute to WLB research at solidifying the concept of WLB by examining its relationship with four important individual outcomes: job satisfaction, life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression.
Furthermore, we know very little about the impact of cultures on the relationship between WLB and individual outcomes. A recent review of cross-national work–life research has identified only two cross-cultural studies focusing on WLB compared with 29 focusing on conflict and nine on enrichment; the only cultural dimension examined in these studies was gender egalitarianism (Ollier-Malaterre, 2014). This is a clear shortcoming of current research given that numerous calls have been issued to broaden the scope and ambition of work–life research by conducting cross-national studies that consider the impact of multiple cultural dimensions (Greenhaus and Allen, 2011, Kossek et al., 2011, Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013 and Poelmans, 2005). In this paper we address this gap by testing whether the relationships between WLB, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression are moderated by two important cultural dimensions: (1) individualism/collectivism (I/C) and (2) gender egalitarianism (GE). Based on a sample of 1416 employees from seven distinct cultures – Malaysian, Chinese, New Zealand Maori, New Zealand European, Spanish, French, and Italian, we find strong support for direct effects of WLB across all of the study's samples. We also find moderating effects of I/C and GE on these relationships.
Our study makes three important contributions to the literature. First, we contribute to establish WLB as a solid construct that sheds light on major individual outcomes, thereby encouraging future research on WLB as a way to better understand a complex work–life interface, and encouraging practitioners to assess their employees' WLB as part of their HR efforts. Second, our study is unique in the burgeoning body of cross-cultural research on the work–life interface (for a review, see Ollier-Malaterre, 2014) since it is the first, to our knowledge, to focus on WLB rather than work–family conflict or work–family enrichment and to have collected evidence that two dimensions of national culture, i.e. I/C and GE, moderate the relationships between WLB and individual outcomes. The finding that WLB has beneficial outcomes for individuals across seven distinct cultures lends further support to the construct of WLB. Third, our study provides evidence that work–life concepts that originated in Western cultures are generalizable beyond these cultures — we do so by including cultures of growing interest in the literature (e.g. Malaysia and China) as well as understudied cultures (e.g. New Zealand European and Maori).
