To my husband and friend, mentor and colleague, pillar of strength and love of my life, Isaac, for your indescribable understanding. To the management and municipal managers I studied, thank you for your unwavering support in answering my very long questionnaire.
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Background of the study
- Statement of the problem
- Research objectives
- Research questions
- Motivation for the study
- Significance of the study
- Scope and limitations of the study
- Structure of the thesis
- Chapter one: Introduction
- Chapter two: South African public sector: Employee health and wellness strategic framework for the public service framework for the public service
- Chapter three: Work-life balance strategies (WLBS)
- Chapter four: Sense of coherence (SOC)
- Chapter five: Work-life balance (WLB)
- Chapter six: Theoretical framework guiding the study
- Chapter eight: Findings
- Chapter nine: Discussion of findings
- Chapter ten: Summary of findings, recommendations and conclusion
The main objective of the study is to determine the relationship between WLB and SOC in a municipality in the South African public sector. The population of this study was limited to eight municipality groups in the South African public sector.
CHAPTER TWO: SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLIC SECTOR
EMPLOYEE HEALTH AND WELLNESS STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
Introduction
This chapter reviews the literature relating to the South African public sector and explores the Employee Health and Wellness Strategic Framework for the Public Service (EHWSFPS) and its purpose. This is to help shape the reader's understanding of the South African public sector and the EHWSFPS, as well as why it was implemented in the municipal workplace examined in this study.
Defining major concepts
- Human Resource (HR) practices adopted by the South African public service to assist employees assist employees
- a Situational analysis
- b Health and productivity management
- c Safety, Health, Environment, Risk and Quality Management (SHERQ)
- d Wellness management
- Wellness programmes in the literature
- Conclusion
This led to the establishment of the Public Service Health and Wellbeing Strategic Framework (EHWSFPS). Below is a functional description of the wellness program as available at EHWSFPS.
CHAPTER THREE: WORK-LIFE BALANCE STRATEGIES (WLBS)
- Introduction
- Work-life balance strategies (WLBS) background
- Theories supporting WLBS in this study
- Theories underlying the adoption of WLBS
- Review of literature on work-life balance strategies (WLBS)
- Types of work-life balance strategies (WLBS)
- Conclusion
However, researchers are of the opinion that the integration and support of an organization's overall culture (ways of doing things) and management support may be of greater importance than the actual WLBS adopted by the workplace (Allen, 2001; Anderson et al ., 2002 This researcher recognizes the importance of support in the work-family literature and acknowledges its influence on individual employee outcomes.
CHAPTER FOUR: SENSE OF COHERENCE (SOC)
Introduction
This researcher was unable to find scholars investigating the role of WLBS in achieving WLB and improving SOC. This chapter provided a fundamental insight into the South African public sector and HR practices relating to WLBS from a national and international perspective. It presented the context of the study and a literature review related to the topic of WLBS.
Definitions: Stress/stressor
It also highlights the review of literature on work and family stressors and their effect on SOC. This is because SOC has been identified as a mechanism that helps an individual cope with stress; therefore, the discussion of stress in this chapter can add value to the study. This contributed to the reason for the discussion of older literature references on the discussion about stress in this study, in order to establish the meaning that is pertinent to the study.
The meaning of stress (or)
This study hypothesizes that stressors from the work and family environment can create imbalance in a person's work life or be mitigated by the presence of strong SOC and appropriate WLBS in the organization. On the other hand, chronic stress takes a longer time and results in the lack of resolution of the threatening problem or issue. Because of the dissimilarity between prolonged (chronic) and acute (acute) stressors, Beehr and Franz (1987) report that there may be a difference in how they affect an individual's stress and outcome.
Types of stressors examined in the study
- Absence of autonomy
- Function vagueness and role conflict
- Family and family stressors
Due to the fact that work stress is widespread in the workplace, an increasing number of workers report that they. This suggests that the environment in which an individual grows up is important in the individual's life outcome. Major changes in modern times may have led to resultant changes in the perspective of the family unit.
- Defining sense of coherence
- Background of the SOC concept
- How SOC is developed
- The role of SOC
- Measurement of SOC and the validity of the SOC scale
- Conclusion
This study hypothesizes that SOC will influence the achievement of WLB in the face of work-life stressors using the WLBS available to the individual at work. But Feldt, Kinnunen, et al. 2000) found that SOC can change as a result of changes in the workplace, emphasizing that SOC is not a rigid characteristic. Therefore, it could be hypothesized that strong SOC may be positively related to work and family stressors, which could directly or indirectly lead to the mitigation of stressors.
CHAPTER FIVE: WORK-LIFE BALANCE (WLB)
Introduction
WLB background
In line with Guest's (2002) proposal, this study identified three work-related problems, namely role ambiguity/conflict, lack of control, and workplace stress, that could be related to work-life imbalance. In the area of life (family and personal), this study identified parenting and caring for children, caring for the elderly, strain in relationships and the absence of marital support as factors that could cause work-life imbalance among individual employees. This study investigates the association WLB has with SOC among professional-level employees in a South African public sector municipality.
Work-life balance defined
- Present study definition of work-life balance
Another question is: how does this “built-in mechanism” help the individual in the face of work and family stressors. This definition of balance depends on the intersection between efficiency and fulfillment with the two life domains of work and family. This researcher will consider satisfaction with work and family situations as outcomes of balance in the study.
Elements of balance: satisfaction and involvement
- Satisfaction balance
- Involvement balance
- Conflict paradigm
- Equilibrium paradigm
Stress from the family can interfere with work and vice versa. Achieving objectives (performance) does not isolate the fact that an employee faces stressors at work and in the family. Balance should mean the stability maintained by the individual on a consistent and ongoing basis in the face of work and family stressors.
Traditional theories of work-life balance
- Spill over theory
- Compensation theory
- Segmentation theory
- Instrumental theory
- The conflict theory
Studies in the last thirty years (1980s - 1990s) have explored more elements that add additional complexity to the effect that work and family have on each other. These scarce resources (strength, time and mental assets) are highly contested by role performance in the work and family domains. But the use of any of the theories can be more effective if supported by empirical analysis.
Contemporary theories of WLB
- Resource Drain Theory
So this means that individuals cross these boundaries every day in their work-family interactions. This means that in certain professions it is difficult to draw a line between work and family. This could contribute to the assessment of work and family stressors in this study to determine their impact on an individual employee's SOC.
Implications of work-life balance
Some of the undesirable consequences of work-family involvement for individual employees and organizations are highlighted by poor performance, frequent employee absenteeism from work, less satisfaction in marital and family relationships, high employee turnover, despair and poor health (Barlow, Allen , & Choate, 2004; Dobson & Smith, 2000), the abandonment of highly skilled family and childcare work by women (Wallis, 2004), and the retraining of highly skilled workers in plumbing skills (O'Donnell, 2005). Huang et al. 2004) believe that workers saddled with the responsibility of caring for elderly relatives face more challenges in achieving work-family balance, compared to their colleagues who do not have such responsibilities. In the context of the literature, this study suggests that implementing WLBS, which succinctly address work and family stressors and assist individual employees in achieving WLB, could enhance the benefits of WLB for both the individual and the organization.
Criticisms of WLB
Some of the scholars who share the same sentiments include Lewis et al. 2009) further questioned the components of work and housework. Some of the items on the scale include "The greatest satisfaction in my life comes from my family" and. As a rule of thumb, this level of internal consistency is acceptable (George & Mallery, 2003; Pallant, 2011).
Conclusion
According to the study conducted by Blau (1985), Kanungo's measure is unidimensional and therefore an unchanged scale used in mental identification when compared to the reduced version measure of Lodahl and Kejner (1965). The response to the items of this scale as used in this study was based on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1) strongly disagree to 5) strongly agree. The measure was adapted from a 5-item scale developed from the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) of this study. The two-point scale response was based on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1) strongly disagree to 5) strongly agree. Gaps in the literature led to the purpose of this study to explore the relationship between WLB and SOC by examining the impact of work and family stressors on an individual's SOC.
CHAPTER SIX: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK GUIDING THIS STUDY
- Introduction
- Conservation of Resources (COR) theory
- Basic tenets of COR theory
- Demands, resources and strategies model
- Person-Environment (P-E) Fit theory
- Conceptual framework guiding this study
It also resulted in an investigation of WLBS to determine whether they helped employees deal with work and family stressors and the impact WLBS had on an individual employee's SOC. Therefore, this study adopts COR theory in investigating the relationship between WLB and SOC. In addition, P-E theory has been extended to encompass the individual and the workplace.
CHAPTER SEVEN: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Introduction
Research objectives
Research question
Research philosophy
- Positivism
- Realism
- Interpretivism
- Pragmatic viewpoint
- Research viewpoint adopted in the present study
This point of view will not be adopted in the study as the interpretations and perceptions of the researcher and respondents are subjective. This assumption underpins data collection and capturing the meaning of the information collected (Saunders et al., 2011). The review of important research perspectives led the researcher to adopt the pragmatic approach in this study.
Research methods
- The abduction or integration method (combination of research methods)
- Method adopted for the present research
Therefore, the usual basic use of the abductive (integrative) method in reasoning pragmatically is to extend the procedure of asking questions by evaluating the results of previous inductions according to their capacity to predict possible patterns of behavior (Morgan, 2007). The shortcomings observed in examining the relationship between WLB and SOC were resolved through the use of the integration method in designing the conceptual framework that guides this study. The interaction of how to use the integration method in relation to data collection and analysis is discussed in the data analysis chapter (chapter eight) of this study.
Research approach
- Exploratory research
- Descriptive research
- Explanatory research
- Experimental research
- Survey research design
- Case study
- Grounded research theory
- Ethnographic study
- Research design adopted in the present study
It further provides a descriptive breakdown of the association between WLBS and achieving WLB based on the gap discovered in the association between WLB and SOC. The departments of the municipality that participated in the survey were drawn using a simple random sampling method. It is not commonly used in social science studies due to its cost implications (Bryman, 2008).
Research choices
- Mixed methods design approach
Quantitative or qualitative data are mainly collected in a sequential design, while the other type of data is collected subsequently after the collection of the first set of data (Castro et al., 2010). Transformative mixed methods are concerned with the collection and analysis of quantitative and non-numerical data in a simultaneous or sequential manner, based on the problem, objectives and/or hypotheses of the study (Hanson et al., 2005). This is a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis techniques, which are integrated into the process of developing questions to be answered by the study (Saunders et al., 2009; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004).
Target population
- Sampling methods
- a Simple random sampling
- b Systematic sampling
- c Stratified random sampling
- d Proportional stratified sampling
- e Cluster sampling
- f Multi-stage sampling
- Non-probability sampling
The process of choosing a subset of the elements of a population (larger group) of people, events, and/or occurrences is called sampling (Churchill, Brown & Suter, 2010). In the current study, the researcher used cluster sampling in drawing the clusters under investigation by randomly selecting five out of eight municipal clusters. It involves two or more stages of using a combination of some of the probability sampling methods discussed above (Struwig & Stead, 2013).
