A snapshot of work-family conflict among hotel managers in Malaysia - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 34

identity, opportunities for achievement, and deter-
mining standing within the larger community.
Demand of work placed on individuals employed
in the organization has gradually increased (Far-
rell & Geist-Martin, 2005). Through their stud-
ies in related hospitality employees; about half
from total respondents believed that they spent
most their life at work while 78 percent of them
reported that their primary cause of stress were
contributed by work. From the above contempla-
tion, there is noteworthy to study about job related
stress since many researchers also believed that this
negative emotional state may extend and contrib-
uting towards work-family conflict (Fu & Shaffer,
2001).
An extensive literature revealed that a group of
five elements being most relevant to affect one's
wellbeing at workplace including number of work
hours; schedule inflexibility; work stressor; job
involvement; and social support at work. Based on
Anderson and Ungemah (1999) findings, the work
hours' programs variables are becoming more pop-
ular with both large and small companies; employ-
ers realize they are good for employee's morale and
for business. Second elements involved is schedule
inflexibility which refers to the inability to alter
one's work schedule to meet work and non-work
pursuits, including the family (Golden, 2009) and
will cause “time bind”, a term means an imbal-
ance between the demand of work and demand of
family or personal life (Hochschild, 1997). Next,
work stressor may refer to any characteristic of
the workplace that poses a threat to an individual.
This may be related to either work demand a per-
son cannot meet or the lack of sufficient resources
to meet work needs (Interactive, 2011). Forth ele-
ment; job involvement was defined as the degree
to which a person identifies psychologically with
the job, and the importance of the job to the per-
son's self-image and self-concept (Uygur & Kilic,
2009). Ballout (2008) noted that job involvement
is one potential work-related variable that may
cause work-family conflict. Another work-related
variable that relates to work-family conflict is job
social support have pointed out that social support
from the non-work domain, such as the partners or
family members is of great importance in reducing
work-family conflict (Sloan, Newhouse & Thomp-
son, 2013).

pressure may exert an individual's emotional state;
meanwhile excessive and uncontrollable stress may
contribute towards work-family conflict in the
long run (Bazana & Dodd, 2013). Through litera-
ture review, various antecedents were reviewed and
a group of three elements being most relevant to
affect one's wellbeing outside of work namely gen-
der, parental demands as well as working spouse
(Kim & Ling, 2001).
Gender is perhaps the socio-demographic
characteristic most often included in studies of
work-family conflict and career success (Rama-
doss & Rajadhyaksha, 2012). Traditional gender
roles assumed that men are primarily responsible
for family financial support by working, while
women are primarily responsible for childcare
and household duties (Loscocco, 2000). Next,
a study by Ballout (2008) indicates that parental
demand can affect work-family conflict and subse-
quently success in careers. Parents tend to experi-
ence more work family conflict than non-parents
as they need to spend greater amount of time at
home taking care of their children (Kim & Ling,
2001). Working spouses is another element that
might be e x pected to experience more work-family
conflict than those who are not working, because
they often encounter dual demands from work
and family activities, and social expectations may
pressurized them to do good job in both work and
family domains (Ballout, 2008). Therefore, work-
ing spouse who think that their work is very impor-
tant will highly committed to their work will spent
more time to work, thus, forcing their husband to
share home care responsibilities (Martire, Stephens
& Townsend, 2000). On the other hand, Judge,
Cable, Boudreau and Bretz (1995) said having a
non-working spouse may be associated with a high
rate of career progress; while (1992) found in their
cross-cultural study examining the antecedents and
outcomes of work-family conflict in a sample of
working women in Singapore showed that spouse
support did reduces work-family conflict.

2.3 Work-Family Conflict (WFC)
Work-family conflict is a form of inter-role conflict
in which pressures from the work role are contrary
with pressures from the family-role, and this con-
flict effect on the quality of both work and family
domains (Thomas & Ganster, 1995). Bragger Rod-
riguez-Srednicki, Kutcher, Indovino and Rosner
(2005) defined work-family conflict as interference
of work demands with one's abilities to perform
his or her family responsibilities. Work-family con-
flict is divided into three parts such as job-spouse
conflict, job-parent conflict and job-homemaker
conflict as married couples usually play more than
one role in the family.

2.2 Non-Work Variable (NWV)
One's wellbeing may be affected by various personal
and social factors in addition to those encountered
at work. Non-work stress can be defined as a real
or imagined imbalance between the demands on
the home and the family's ability to meet those
demands (Jones & Fletcher, 1996). This form of