Thesis "Women between Family and Work and the Welfare State" examines the challenges of balancing work and family roles of men and women, specifically in relation to institutional conditions of the Welfare State in the Czech Republic. The author analyzes and identifies external factors influencing family life and work balance. Furthermore, the author compares situation in the Czech Republic with selected countries of the European Union. The most important theoretical backgrounds of the thesis are the Welfare State theory, the family theory and the gender inequality theory. The main methods applied in the thesis are secondary data analysis and comparative analysis. The MA is divided in eight chapters. Key part of the thesis is analytical part, which consists of four chapters. First of them analyzes the external and internal factors that influence the behavior of men and women, namely the cultural value framework, structural labor market conditions and preferences of men, women and employers. The second one examines the institutional limitations and opportunities created by the Czech Welfare State. The comparative analysis of the situation among the Czech Republic, France and Sweden is carried out in the third chapter. The last chapter analyzes the motives and strategies of men's and women's family...

This thesis deals with the work-life balance issues encountered by cardiologists and cardiac surgeons. The main objective of this study was to find out on how these young doctors in cardiology specialization training combine their work and other areas of their lives that they consider important and draw attention to the problems of being junior doctors with a vision to use the obtained results to improve their conditions both for work and for quality of life. Qualitative research techniques were utilized and data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with our respondents. The theoretical part of this thesis presents the informations and concepts regarding balance between work versus private life concerning their interdependencies. It focuses both on professional and social aspects and their eventual conflict. Partly, it maps motivation: motivators (motives and aspirations), which led these young doctors in their lives and careers, as shared motives characterize the level of content and identification with professional roles and their professional aspirations. Widely, it deals with the working conditions of junior doctors that the de/motivation to contribute. Moreover, part of it was also given to possible future impacts on doctor's health resulting from failure of work-life balance. The...

The diploma thesis deals with flexible forms of work in the Czech Republic. After the short introduction of the history and theoretical frameworks, particular types of alternative work forms used in the Czech labour market are presented. Readers are faced with part-time jobs, flexible work hours, home office and other. Special part is dedicated to occupying of part-time workers who are employed in the mode of Contract of Services, which is specific for Czech labour market and is involved in flexible work forms in this text. The great part of this thesis occupies case study, which was held at headquarters of one Czech company and which provides view of function of flexible forms of work on the side of the employer and employees as well. Data analysis offers mainly information coming from perception of alternative working forms by their users, which means employees, but by provider as well. Emphasis is placed primarily on evaluation of motives which lead into implementing and demanding of flexible work forms and also their advantages and disadvantages. Readers can find in analytic part also profiling of group of employees working in alternative working modes. These profiles are built-up from the view of the character of employees positions and from their individual characteristics as well. It is also...

This thesis deals with the topic of work-life balance in narrations of Ukrainian female migrants in the Czech Republic. Female migrants are in a difficult situation while managing these two spheres of their lives, because they are situated in an unknown milieu and lack family environment and social ties. Based on fourteen in-depth interviews I analyze how these women deal with this situation and how they feel about it. The research shows that the women's work trajectories develop in accordance with their reasons to migrate and their family situation. The family situation especially their motherhood seems to be crucial in choosing the work-life balance strategies. Thus, in my analysis I show how these strategies differs among women who brought their children with them to the Czech republic, those who brought them later, those who left them at Ukraine and those who gave birth to their first children in the Czech Republic. The main attention is paid to female migrants whose children joint them later as they go through the most distinct changes in managing their work-life balance. In my analysis I identified some problems which Ukrainian migrants have to face considering reconciliation of their work and personal life. The most crucial one is the absence of the extended family and its help with...

Background: Compared to the general population, physicians are more likely to experience increased burnout and lowered work-life balance. In our article, we want to analyze whether the workplace of a physician is associated with these outcomes. Methods: In September 2019, physicians from various specialties answered a comprehensive questionnaire. We analyzed a subsample of 183 internists that were working full time, 51.4% were female. Results: Multivariate analysis showed that internists working in an outpatient setting exhibit significantly higher WLB and more favorable scores on all three burnout dimensions. In the regression analysis, hospital-based physicians exhibited higher exhaustion, cynicism and total burnout score as well as lower WLB. Conclusions: Physician working at hospitals exhibit less favorable outcomes compared to their colleagues in outpatient settings. This could be a consequence of workplace-specific factors that could be targeted by interventions to improve physician mental health and subsequent patient care.

Workplace interventions provide a practical and important means of providing support for employees' work-family needs. However, work-family interventions are rare and are generally not thoroughly evaluated. The current study seeks to better understand the impacts of STAR ("Support. Transform. Achieve. Results."), the large-scale work-family intervention developed and implemented by the Work, Family, & Health Network (see Bray et al., 2013). Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), this study examines supervisors' participation in STAR through assessment of three primary supervisor-specific outcomes: training-related views and behaviors, well-being, and the work-family interface. The sample, consisting of 184 supervisors from 30 extended-care facilities throughout the northeastern United States, comes from archival data that were collected by the Work, Family, & Health Network. Results show a lack of support for STAR intervention effects on supervisor-level outcomes. Despite the lack of statistically significant effects on supervisors, it is important to note the lack of iatrogenic effects, indicating that participation in the STAR intervention did not harm supervisor outcomes. Implications, future directions, and limitations of the study are discussed.

In 2008, there were more than 5,200 workplace fatalities in the United States (BLS, 2010b). During the same time period, U.S. employees missed almost 1.1 million days from work (BLS, 2010c). Accidents are unexpected outcomes that result not only from individuals' behaviors, but from contextual factors (Krause, 1997; Reason, 1990). Therefore, unsafe behaviors have to be interpreted according to a combination of what is occurring in the environment and what the individual is doing in that environment. The present study sought to create a more comprehensive model of safety by means of macroergonomics. Macroergonomics utilizes sociotechnical systems theory to posit that a work system is composed of a personnel subsystem (i.e., ways individuals perform tasks), a technological subsystem (i.e., tasks to be performed), and external factors (Hendrick, 2002a). Perceived control over work hours, an aspect of the technological subsystem, was examined as an antecedent of work-family conflict. Supervisor instrumental support, an aspect of the personnel subsystem, was examined as a moderator of the relationships between perceived control over work hours and work-family conflict. Supervisors have an imperative role in employees' perception of control over their work hours (Kelly & Moen, 2007). Supervisor instrumental support was also hypothesized to moderate the relationships between work-family conflict and safety performance. Supervisors who support their employees in their work-family matters exceed mandatory requirements set forth to protect workers' safety and health (Mearns, Hope, Ford, & Tetrick, 2010). A majority of the 360 participants in the present study were grocery store employees who worked in the front end of the store as cashiers. Job tenure in this particular grocery store chain was an average of 7 years (SD = 5.96) and the average number of hours worked per week was 31 (SD = 8.55). The employees were an average age of 38 years old (SD = 15.25). Two hundred and sixty-two (73%) of the participants were female, 330 (92%) were White, 196 (55%) employees were married or living as married, 146 (41%) employees identified themselves as parents with children living at home, and 58 (16%) employees provided elder care. The data were analyzed using a moderated mediation model. An employee's perceived control over his/her work hours was negatively associated with work-to-family and family-to-work conflict. Work-to-family conflict was not significantly associated with either safety compliance or participation. In contrast, family-to-work conflict was significantly associated with both safety compliance and participation. These findings replicate Cullen and Hammer's (2007) findings that family-to-work conflict, but not work-to-family conflict, is negatively associated with safety compliance and participation. The replication of these significant findings gives support to macroergonomics' assertion that external forces (i.e., family) can affect the safety of employees. All of the meditating and moderating relationships proposed in this dissertation were not significant. I conducted post hoc analyses to determine other possible significant paths in the model examined. The FSSB dimension of supervisor instrumental support was found to positively affect both safety compliance and participation. Supervisor instrumental support was also found to directly affect work-to-family conflict. Overall FSSB and its subdimensions demonstrated similar patterns in the hypothesized relationships and in additional relationships examined. Numerous implications can be recognized from this dissertation. First, interdisciplinary approaches to safety research are emerging and important in the pursuit of safer work environments. Macroergonomics and I/O psychology have commonalities that lend themselves to a good partnership where researchers can learn from each other and collaborate to advance the study of safety. Second, organizations need to focus on the stressors their employees experience as part of their safety programs, and numerous studies, including this dissertation, have found that family-to-work conflict impacts safety compliance and participation. Future safety research may incorporate macroergonomics, which emphasizes that focusing on one adverse aspect of the system may not be enough to create valuable change if there are other adverse factors still creating demands elsewhere in the system. This will allow for a more comprehensive model that ensures certain aspects of the system are not neglected, which can reduce effectiveness of constructs used to create positive changes.

Work engagement is an increasingly popular construct in organizational and occupational health psychology. However, despite substantial advances in our understanding of work engagement at the between-person level, scholars have argued for increased investigation into what drives engagement on a daily level for individual employees. In the current study, a within-person, day-level design was employed to examine the relationships between nonwork mastery experiences, job crafting behaviors, and daily work engagement. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (Hobfoll, 1989) theory, nonwork mastery experiences and job crafting were operationalized as employee-driven, resource-building strategies that assist employees in generating important psychological and job resources that can be drawn upon in order to maintain high levels of work engagement during the day. Moreover, a reciprocal relationship between work engagement during the day and nonwork mastery experiences the same evening was tested. Employees from a U.S. technology firm provided responses in the morning, at lunchtime, and after work each day for five working days. Multilevel structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses in the current study. Findings revealed no support for the hypothesized model at the within-person level of analysis; however, ancillary analyses suggested support for an indirect relationship between job crafting and work engagement via increased positive affect. Moreover, nearly all the proposed relationships emerged at the between-person level of analysis providing some insight into the effects of resource building strategies and work engagement across participants. Finally, seeking structural resources was identified as a person-level factor that explained variance in employees' initial levels of work engagement at the start of the week, as well as the trajectory of engagement over the course of the week. The current findings contribute to our understanding of bottom-up, employee-driven behaviors that help to sustain engagement over time. Suggestions for future research and implications for practice are discussed.

As many Americans move away from the traditional homemaker-breadwinner family model, research on gender and work/family conflict has become increasingly important and the question of gender difference in experiences of work/family conflict continues to be relevant. While there is research that shows women tend to experience significantly greater work/family conflict than men, there are also studies that have shown little or no gender difference, and some that offer evidence that men are reporting more work/family conflict. This study contributes to the debate by examining gender and occupational prestige in regard to working parents' perceptions of work-to-family and family-to-work spillover, with a quantitative analysis of national probability sampled survey data from the General Social Survey's Quality of Working Life Module from the years 2006 and 2010. The findings indicate that fathers are reporting significantly more work/family conflict than mothers, and that higher prestige work is associated with greater work/family conflict, but occupational prestige has a gendered effect with work-to-family spillover and is found to be especially salient for fathers. Overall, this study demonstrates the need for policy-makers and employers to acknowledge men's parenthood. The findings are evidence that there is a need for incentivized paternity leave initiatives in the United States, as well as more universal employee work/life programs that address the barriers to fathers utilizing family-accommodating benefits.

Engineers belong to a group of workers that will form a large and important part of the green transition in northern Sweden. At the same time there are many engineers with the right competence in the energy sector that remains missing. To resolve the future skills gap, this essay aims to find an understanding of engineers’ perspectives of the labor market and how to manage and attract the skills needed for a sustainable industrialization in northern Sweden. This essay used qualitative methods, more specifically semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis, to gather and analyse the collected data. The results of the essay indicate that engineers in the energy sector value development opportunities, flexibility, and the opportunity to achieve a work life balance highly. Thus, salary seems to not form a large part of the engineers most important preferences in their work life. This shows that regardless of what sector a company belongs to, they could focus on and promote motivational factors rather than monetary rewards.