The Work-Family Roles Dynamics during Home-Based Teleworking

Abstract

Teleworking from home gives workers some degree of temporal and spatial flexibility, and at the same time, poses some consequences in terms of conflicts from the demands, requirements, expectations, and behaviors from the forces associated with both work roles and family roles. This integrative literature review investigated the conditions or forces that are responsible for the bi-directional inter-role conflict and the outcomes of the conflict when employees are teleworking from home, by synthesizing new and grey literature about work-family conflict and home-based teleworking. The forces from the work and family systems which are organizational, personal, spatial, temporal, technological, psychological, and familial are the crux of the work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict as they either cause friction or smoothness to the transition from work roles to family roles and vice versa during home-based teleworking. The forces either act as catalysts or inhibitors during the transition from work (family) roles to family (work) roles. The findings from this review were synthesized into the work-family roles dynamics model by incorporating concepts from physical sciences. The work-family roles dynamics model provides insights into the transition of home-based teleworkers and the work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict that ensue in the work and family systems. This article also offers a definition of work-family conflict based on knowledge from the synthesized literature. The work-family roles dynamics model posits new explanations about teleworking from home and bi-directional inter-role conflict. The work-family roles dynamics theory yields new ideas and questions for future research and implications for human resource management.