Work-Family Conflicts and Intention to Quit in the Health Sector
Balancing the demands of professional and family life represents a major challenge for workers, organizations and society. The main causes of these challenges can be traced to drastic changes at the workplace and family life, including the increased workload due to downsizing and an evolution in work and family roles. All these changes negatively affect organizational performance, through the mediating effect of withdrawal behaviors, intentions to quit and voluntary turnover. This situation is particularly severe in health services, especially in the case of nurses, where voluntary turnover can reduce the quality of health care, increase the workload of the remaining staff, reduce motivation of those remaining in the organization and, eventually, increase their own intentions to quit. The main purpose of this research is to investigate how work-family interferences might affect nurses’ intentions to quit, using a bidirectional (work-family and family-work), and multidimensional (time-, effort- and behavior-based conflicts) conceptualisation of these interferences. Two competing theoretical frameworks are proposed in the literature to explain these interferences, the Stress Management Model and the Domain-Specific to Predictor-Outcomes Model, and our goal is to explore which one of these two models provides a better explanation of the phenomenon. We invited nurses from a regional hospital in Quebec to answer a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. We received 404 complete, usable questionnaires and we analyzed them using multivariate regression. Results suggest that work-family interferences in terms of time and effort increase intentions to quit, thus providing support for the use of the Stress Management Model when explaining work-family interferences with work outcomes. Our results open new management implications and avenues for future research.