Working conditions and the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities

Working conditions and the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities

Not only mothers wish and need to combine paid work with their family responsibilities at home, but also fathers increasingly want to engage in child care activities. Reducing working hours is one common strategy when responsibilities at work and at home are difficult to combine. Thus, explaining the determinants of the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities helps to understand the time squeeze between work and family life, which is often posed in research and public debate. Existing research has investigated the determinants of the general desire to reduce working hours, neglecting the fact that it could arise from various reasons. Hence, to understand the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities needs distinctive analyses specified to this reason. Using an approach based on social exchange theory, we not only investigate explicit resources and demands at the workplace, but also implicit psychological contracts (e.g. assumed behavioral expectations from the employer) for the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities.

For this research, we make use of unique data of the German study "employment relationships as social exchange" (beata). First results based on logistic regression analyses of 471 employed mothers and fathers with and without the desire to reduce working hours due to family responsibilities support our expectation. Missing resources at the workplace (e.g. flexible working arrangements) as well as work demands (time pressure or late working hours) increase the likelihood to have the desire to work reduced hours. Interestingly, missing resources are more important than existing demands. Besides, implicit assumptions about the expectations of the employer (e.g. about steady presence at the workplace) matter too.