Ties With Benefits: Relationship Between Relational Multiplexity, Gender, and Work-Life Balance

Flexible work arrangement policies provide employees the flexibility to manage their work and personal lives. Despite various efforts of public organizations, struggles to simplify or integrate work and private life demands continue, resulting in employees’ lower satisfaction, higher stress, higher turnover, and lower productivity. Our study focuses on the social environments of individual employees by investigating how social networks affect individuals’ efforts to balance work and life in a higher education setting. Using a 2011 NSF-funded national survey of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) faculty in US universities, we examine the impact of multiplexity in social networks on work-life balance (WLB) and how the impact varies by gender. Our regression results suggest that the impact of relational multiplexity on WLB follows an inverse U-shape pattern and varies by gender. In particular, multiplex ties that individuals socialize outside their work can affect their WLB and the impact varies by gender.