Close Coupling in Work-Family Relationships: Making and Implementing Decisions in a New Family Business and at Home

Abstract

This research examined the relative influence of husbands and wives in decisions concerning several activities that occur in both the home and the business. Ratings by 24 women who with their husbands had recently opened a retail or service establishment indicated that influence was significantly related to (1) setting (wives had more influence at home), (2) activity (wives had most influence in decisions about division of labor), and (3) particular setting-activity combinations. Such a differential pattern of influence may reflect a way of resolving conflicting norms of equality and husband dominance. Additional findings suggest the operation of an equity norm: Wives' influence at home and in the business varied according to the number of hours they worked, and according to whether the business was "gender typed." Qualitative data indicated that couples rarely discussed division of labor in either setting, although this issue was a frequent source of family tension. Two years later, most of the respondents from the 15 firms that survived reported that the business had positively affected their marriages.

Keywords

family business role conflict work-family gender equality women in business

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

ADAMS, J. S. Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Academic Press, 1965.

ALDRICH, H. E. , & AUSTER, E. R. Even dwarfs started small: Liabilities of age and size and their strategic implications. Research in Organizational Behavior, 1986, 8, 165-198.

BLUMER, H. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

COHEN, J. Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (Rev. ed.). New York: Academic Press, 1977.

DODD, D. H. , & SCHULTZ, R. F., Jr. Computational procedures for estimating magnitude of effect for some analysis of variance designs. Psychological Bulletin, 1973, 79, 391-395.

GUTEK, B. A. , REPETTI, R. L. , & SILVER, D. L. Nonwork roles and stress at work. In C. L. Cooper and R. Payne (Eds.), Stress at work. Chichester: Wiley, 1988.

HOMANS, G. C. Social behavior: Its elementary forms. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

KANTER, R. M. Work andfamily in the United States: A critical review and agendafor research and policy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1977.

KEPNER, E. The family and the firm: A coevolutionary perspective. Organizational Dynamics, 1983, 12(1), 57-70.

10.

McGRATH, J. E. , & KELLY, J. R. Time and human interaction: Toward a social psychology of time. New York: Guilford, 1986.

11.

ROSENBLATT, P. C.

Family Inc.

Psychology Today, July 1985, 55-59.

12.

ROSENBLATT, P. C. , de MIK, L. , ANDERSON, R. M. , & JOHNSON, P. A. The family in business. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.

13.

SCHOOLER, C. , MILLER, J. , MILLER, K. A. , & RICHTAND, C. N. Work for the household: Its nature and consequences for husbands and wives. American Journal of Sociology, 1984, 90, 97-124.

14.

STAR, A. D. , & MASSEL, M. Z. Survival rates for retailers. Journal of Retailing, 1981, 57, 87-99.

15.

STINCHCOMBE, A. L. Social structure and organizations. In J. G. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizations. Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1965.

16.

STRAUSS, A. Negotiations: Varieties, contexts, processes, and social order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978.

17.

WEICK, K. E. The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed.). Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1979.

18.

WICKER, A. W. Behavior settings reconsidered: Temporal stages, resources, internal dynamics, context. In D. Stokols and I. Altman (Eds.), Handbook of environmentalpsychology (Vol. 1). New York: Wiley, 1987.

19.

WICKER, A. W. , & KING, J. C. Employment, ownership, and survival in microbusiness: A study of new retail and service establishments. Small Business Economics, 1989, 1, 137-152.