Managing the conflict between work and family role demands is a critical issue that has generated substantial interest for both individuals and organizations in recent decades. One factor thought to contribute to the occurrence of work-family conflict (WFC) is the amount of time committed to activities in either the family or to the work domain. Because time is a finite resource, it has been posited that when one dedicates a certain amount of time to one domain, this will invariably take away from the amount of time available for activities in the other domain. The result of this is conflict between the domains of work and family (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985). However, the relationship between time at work and work-family conflict is not always this clear. In the current study, it was proposed that work schedule fit is a moderator of the relationship between working hours and both forms WFC. That is, the nature of the relationship between the amount of time spent at work and WFC depends, in part, on perceived work schedule fit.Recent research has gone beyond the notion of the work and family domains existing in perpetual conflict and has begun to focus on how these two domains can benefit each other. It has been argued that certain resources gained in the work domain can be beneficial to the family domain, and vice-versa (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006). Furthermore, affective states in one domain can spill over to the next, which could have both positive and negative consequences. In the current study, it was proposed that work schedule fit is a resource that facilitates both positive spillover from work and positive spillover from the family. Hypotheses were tested using moderated multiple regression and zero-order correlations. Support was not found for proposed moderator hypotheses, however support for mediation was found in exploratory analyses. Support was also found for the proposed relationship between work schedule fit and both positive spillover from home and positive spillover from work. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / Women’s roles in the workplace have increased but expectations within their family roles have not diminished. Work-family conflict (WFC) occurs when work and family roles are mutually incompatible in some respect. Mothers’ representations of their own particular personal contexts seem largely absent from the cultural iconography and so motivations for the study included bringing to light the phenomenological experiences of contemporary fulltime working mothers by developing a rich description of their lived experience. These ideas have not been widely explored in South Africa. The study aimed to explore how full-time working mothers experience work-family conflict, including how they conceptualise their dual roles, how salient each role is to them, the factors in the work and family domains which are particularly pertinent for them and any coping strategies they might employ. The study used as a theoretical framework the model of work-family conflict developed by Greenhaus and Beutell in 1985, together with an extension from the work of Amstad, Meier, Fasel, Elfering and Semmer in 2011. The study used a phenomenological methodology. Eight middle-class, professional, full-time working mothers from the Southern Suburbs and City Bowl of Cape Town were interviewed individually, using a semi-structured interview schedule. A qualitative paradigm was used to analyse the interviews. Emotional and cognitive repercussions of WFC were many, including feelings of unsustainability. Some participants acknowledged a need to compromise in order to cope, but the current normative messages are not conducive to this. Participants aspire, not to stop working, because the role of worker is regarded as important for self-definition, but to reduce their overall load. The generalisability of this study was reduced because of its localised ambit, its small size and some similarities in socio-economic profile among the participants. Future studies could further explore the choices or strategies which are successful in reducing WFC.