Abstract

One of the most popular topics of the last years is the improvement of work-life balance because of the changing relationship between employment and family. Family-friendly policies are not only a central issue in the labor market and family policy, but have also become an inherent part of the human resources policy in establishments. While family policy measures have already been evaluated, there is a research gap for organizational measures. Studies on this subject were usually practice-oriented, while theoretical explanations were absent to this point. In addition, either employers or employees were considered. Therefore important dimensions of the interaction between individual action, organizational strategies of implementing measures to improve work-life balance and their embedding in relevant contexts were disregarded. However, employers and employees should be considered together in order to draw conclusions about the actual effectiveness and reach of family-friendly measures in establishments. Furthermore structural factors such as regional childcare and legislation, e.g. parental leave, have to be included. For this reason we use linked employer-employee data of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in the proposed project. These data permit an analysis of the interactions between organizational measures, family policies and regional context factors on individual labor market decisions. There are two main research questions: (1) Which context factors induce establishments to initiate and support work-life balance measures for their employees and which temporal changes show up due to the increasing importance of this topic? (2) How do organizational family-friendly arrangements influence the labor market behavior of the workforce, especially of mothers and fathers, in various organizational and regional contexts and under different family policy frameworks? To answer these questions, we first develop a theoretical model and systematically include the inter-related levels of the individual and the establishments, as well as their environments. Based upon longitudinal and multilevel analyses, we then investigate hypotheses deduced from the theoretical model about the organizational change and the related labor market decisions of mothers and fathers.