Integrating Work and Family Life


Book Description

What happens when work and family space are shared? Beach examines the lives of home-working families and describes the interaction of work and family life. Detailed focus on the family system demonstrates how space and time are utilized, how spouses and children respond, and how the family may perceive home work as an adaptive effort to integrate work and family life. Beach highlights the often overlooked role of children in contributing to this home-work style.




Handbook of Work-Family Integration


Book Description

In today's industrialized societies, the majority of parents work full time while caring for and raising their children and managing household upkeep, trying to keep a precarious balance of fulfilling multiple roles as parent, worker, friend, & child. Increasingly demands of the workplace such as early or late hours, travel, commute, relocation, etc. conflict with the needs of being a parent. At the same time, it is through work that people increasingly define their identity and self-worth, and which provides the opportunity for personal growth, interaction with friends and colleagues, and which provides the income and benefits on which the family subsists. The interface between work and family is an area of increasing research, in terms of understanding stress, job burn out, self-esteem, gender roles, parenting behaviors, and how each facet affects the others. The research in this area has been widely scattered in journals in psychology, family studies, business, sociology, health, and economics, and presented in diverse conferences (e.g., APA, SIOP, Academy of Management). It is difficult for experts in the field to keep up with everything they need to know, with the information dispersed. This Handbook will fill this gap by synthesizing theory, research, policy, and workplace practice/organizational policy issues in one place. The book will be useful as a reference for researchers in the area, as a guide to practitioners and policy makers, and as a resource for teaching in both undergraduate and graduate courses.




Integrating Work and Family


Book Description

Despite calls for a renewal of family values and the proliferation of corporate work-family programs, the goal of achieving a healthy balance between the demands of work and a satisfying family life remains elusive. Dr. Parasuraman, Dr. Greenhaus, and the contributors to this well-balanced and thoughtful volume examine this increasingly prevalent social dilemma from a stakeholder perspective. They see work-family tensions as a multifaceted social issue, and they examine the nature and consequences of these tensions from the viewpoints of individuals, employers, consultants, counseling professionals, and other service providers. Their inclusion of legal, cultural, international, and research perspectives and recognition of the unique concerns of vulnerable groups, such as nonexempt employees and ethnic minorities, add to the breadth of coverage. Academics in the social and behavioral sciences, executive decision-makers in government and business, human resource professionals, and employed men and women interested in achieving work-life balance will find this volume insightful, stimulating, and useful. The editors have arranged their book into five parts and 21 chapters. Part I provides a broad overview of the environmental factors impacting work and family. It then identifies the critical issues and challenges facing individuals, families, and employees in managing the complex interdependencies between work and family roles. In Part II they provide a view of the issues from the vantage point of specific stakeholders. Part III concentrates on the role of culture in shaping ideology, policies, and practices concerning work and family and the relationships among them. Part IV examines the impact of career development programs on employees and their families. It also discusses the effectiveness of alternative career tracks, various usages of work-family benefits by women and men, and the roles employers and employees can play in legitimizing alternative career paths. Part V concludes the book by examining the cultural barriers to achieving more effective integration of work and family, and by analyzing the appropriate role of key stakeholders in addressing work-family problems.




Total Leadership


Book Description

National Bestseller “Students talk about Stewart D. Friedman, a management professor at the Wharton School, with a mixture of earnest admiration, gratitude and rock star adoration.” —New York Times In this national bestseller, Stew Friedman gives you the tools you need to achieve “four-way wins”—improved performance in all domains of life: work, home, community, and self. Friedman, celebrated professor and founding director of the Wharton School’s Leadership Program and its Work/Life Integration Project, explains how three simple yet potent principles—be real, be whole, and be innovative—can help you, no matter what your age or what you do for work, become a better leader and have a richer life. In this engaging adaptation of his hands-on Wharton course, he offers step-by-step instruction to help you create positive, sustainable change in your world. This proven, programmatic method teaches you how to produce stronger results at work, find clearer purpose, feel less stressed, strengthen connections with the people who matter most to you, contribute further to important causes, and gain greater support for your vision of your future. If you’re ready to learn to lead in all parts of your life—this is the book for you. For a full array of Total Leadership tips and tools, visit totalleadership.org. Also look for Stew Friedman’s book, Leading the Life You Want, which builds on Total Leadership by profiling well-known leaders—from Bruce Springsteen to Michelle Obama—who exemplify its principles and demonstrate how success in your work is accomplished not at the expense of the rest of your life, but as the result of meaningful attachments to all its parts.




Career Management & Work-Life Integration


Book Description

Career Management & Work/Life Integration: Using Self-Assessment to Navigate Contemporary Careers is a comprehensive, easy-to-follow guide to managing contemporary careers. Although grounded in theory, the book also provides an extensive set of exercises and activities that can guide career management over the lifespan. Authors Brad Harrington and Douglas T. Hall offer a highly useful self-assessment guide for students and other individuals who want to deal with the challenge of succeeding in a meaningful career while living a happy, well-balanced life. Key Features Bridges theory and application: While the book helps readers gain a better understanding of theories on careers, work life, and human resources, it also guides them to develop a tailored, personalized career strategy for themselves. Offers a rigorous self-assessment process: Serving as the book′s foundation, this self-assessment guide gives readers a wealth of information and insight regarding their own career priorities and strategies. Provides a more thorough experiential view than existing books: This book integrates work from both the career management and the work life field while most academic literature treats these two areas separately. Intended Audience Career Management & Work/Life Integration is a great resource for employers and career planning offices. This book will also by ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Career Management; Leadership Development; Organizational Behavior; and Human Resource Management in the departments of business, management, and organizational psychology. Instructor′s Resources Available upon request, an instructor′s resource CD accompanies the book and includes such teaching aids as PowerPoint slides, and teaching notes for each chapter, as well as assignments, key concepts, and terms for each chapter.




Integrating Family Therapy


Book Description

Integrating Family Therapy brings together family psychology and systems thinking to explore the ways systems therapists actually think and behave to bring about needed family change in the context of other systems. The theme of integration is carried through the book on several levels: integration of the family with school, work, medical, and other social systems; integration of research, theory, and systemic practice; and integration of methods and techniques from diverse schools of family therapy. The result is a book that gives the researcher and practitioner an encompassing perspective of family psychology and systems therapy today.







Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration


Book Description

The majority of university students in the US and around the world are women (Economist, 2006). This recent increase in the education of women has allowed their employment rate to inflate, leading to an influx of issues surrounding the work-life balance. The era surrounding World War II led to an amplified presence of women seeking opportunities for a career, which in turn led to tensions at home and in the workplace as women try to balance the roles of family with a career. Many women have joined men in the provider role and the dual earner family has now become the norm (Gornick and Myers 2003). Traditional roles have shifted as women and men are both parents and workers. The picture of the career women and mother is divided and multi-faceted in existing research findings and opinions. Commonly assessed issues include the social implications of the dual roles of females, cultural norms, workplace policies with attention to female-specific hurdles, and marital satisfaction in gender roles. Various research studies suggest that marital relationships have become more egalitarian (Bielenski and Wagner, 2004), while others find that a large number of well-educated women have left careers for full-time motherhood (Belkin, 2003; Warner, 2005). In 2009, a research group was formed at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology to explore the competing narratives of women’s lives as they balance their work activities with the demands of marriage and motherhood. The ultimate goal of this project was to understand the work-life balance issues of women in the workforce. This work is now known as the Digital Women’s Project (Weber, 2011) and has collected over 400 interviews of women to explore themes around work-life balance. This phenomenological analysis utilizes a narrative life-course framework created by Giele (2008) to explore identity, relational style, drive and motivation, and adaptive style in order to understand the work-life balance of women. Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration brings together the findings of this research group.




Work-Life Integration


Book Description

Developments in IT and communication technology, coupled with the global 24 hour market, have led to boundaries between work and personal life becoming ever more blurred, while work/life policies and practice struggle to keep up. This book aims to challenge traditional thinking on work life balance, and to explore different ways of promoting change at many levels. It provides a historical overview of the topic, critiques contemporary approaches and offers creative ideas for integrating work and personal life in local, national and global contexts.




Work and Family--allies Or Enemies?


Book Description

Offers a lens for viewing the real struggles that business professionals - particularly women - face in their daily battle to find ways of 'getting a life' and 'having it all' based on a pioneering study that surveyed more than 800 business professionals.