Kalliath and Brough (2008) established that there was an increasing interest in matters relating to work-life balance. According to the authors, the rise in curiosity about these issues was caused by the concern that lack of balance in the work-life relationship could lead to poor health and decreased performance of employees. They defined the relationship between deteriorated health conditions and reduced work performance of employees. These two factors are of great importance to employees because of poor health, workers cannot work efficiently and as desired by their employers. Reduced performance, on the other hand, puts the jobs of employees at risk since nonperforming workers hardly get to retain their jobs.
Kalliath and Brough (2008) also brought out that a measure of work-life balance that was well developed was needed to enable organizations to establish whether the policies they had adopted to deal with work-life balance were effective or not. In this approach, the authors stated that policies, such as those intended to be family-friendly, should have been measurable so that their impact on individuals and organizations could be controllable. If this does not happen, then the effect of activities, such as sports, travel, and family events, cannot be measured to establish their effectiveness in balancing the roles between work and everyday life.
Kalliath and Brough (2008) also emphasized that it was important for decision-makers to have the right information regarding work-life balance since this could determine the effectiveness of how they adopted policies that developed work-life balance. The authors presented different definitions of work-life balance so as to illustrate the differences in how various people perceived the issue and how this could influence the accomplishment of implementation policies.
Kalliath and Brough (2008) used data from other researchers to explain how the work-life conflict was caused by a multiplicity of the roles that individuals were expected to handle. They described that role-conflict theorists argued that employees experienced increased stress levels not necessarily because they did not know how to create work-life balance, but because they had too many roles that they were expected to play.
The authors also explained that the quality of life was affected by the stresses that were work-related. This means that negative experiences that occur in the lives of individuals, either at work or in their families, end up affecting the quality of their life and the satisfaction that they end up with.
Through secondary data, the authors stated that the view that work-life balance was a responsibility of the individual came from the legal opinion that home/ family demands might have spilled over into the organization and ended up affecting the ability of employees to concentrate and perform their roles in the workplace. This view has been taken over by events, and currently, organizations realize that by helping employees settle their domestic affairs, they allow them to concentrate better at work. Kalliath and Brough (2008) concluded that work-life balance cut across different roles and should have been, therefore, developed with the aid of individuals and organizations.
Reference
Kalliath, T. & Brough, P. (2008). Work-life Balance: a Review of the Meaning of the Balance Construct. Journal of Management and Organization. 14(3), 323-327.