Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Maintaining a harmonious balance between work and personal life (WLB) is a source of strength, it also contributes to optimal professional performance, is associated with higher satisfaction with family life or life in general. At the same time, work-life conflict (WLC) has a negative impact on career of workers which has a large personal, family, institutional and social influence. From now on, the WLC or WLB is much more examined as a predictor of employees’ wellbeing or other workplace outcomes as job (in)satisfaction. It is much less clear which factors influence these phenomena and the social evaluation of the balance or confrontation, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In this study we proposed a holistic view of work-life conflicts, as a clash of human resources and how they are allocated, as a disfunction in both professional and private life at micro and mezzo environments, and we presented a cross-national analysis of academics’ WLC. Our main question was three-prong: 1. How do academics balance between professional and personal life? 2. How can we predict conflicts? 3. How can a social evaluation of the conflicts be conducted? As independent factors, we used: age, gender, parenthood, country, working hours, academic job title, emotional exhaustion and social support at work to predict work-life conflicts. The novelty of this study is the social evaluation of the phenomenon: the conceptualization of WLC as a dysfunction at different levels of society. We adopt the dual functionality approach for different social environments: at micro, mezzo, or macro levels. For the quantitative analysis, the sample of academics from five Central and Eastern European countries (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine and Hungary) were used (CEETHE 2023 database, N=821). The complex questionnaire included the measures of WLC score based on Hayman (2005). Statistical analyses performed by using SPSS 29 included ANOVA tests, principal component and factor analysis, and, finally, a multistep linear regression. Results show that more than a third (37%) of academics ignore their personal needs, and a third (33%) perceive that they sacrifice their private life because of work. More than a third of them had difficulty balancing between work and private life (39%), were dissatisfied with the time spent outside the workplace (39%), and nearly half of them (42%) reported missing out on personal activities in their private life due to work. The linear stepwise regression model shows that emotional exhaustion long working hours, less academic job title (low academic positions), the decrease in social supports provided by the institution (at mezzo level) and gender (at micro level) are the significant predictors of WLC. This paper contributes to the work of higher education policy makers on social evaluation of institutional and employee functionality, seeking a better work-life balance in the career of academics.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212409137