Work-Life Integration and Management

Very few studies have examined issues of work-life balance among faculty of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. Utilizing data from Harvard University’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education project, this study examined predictors of work-life balance for 2953 faculty members from 69 institutions. The final sample consisted of 1059 (36%) Asian American faculty, 512 (17%) African American faculty, 359 (12%) Latina/o faculty, and 1023 (35%) White/Caucasian faculty. There were 1184 (40%) women faculty and 1769 (60%) men faculty.

Faculty members with families face well-documented challenges in managing the demands of work and life. However, we know less about the experiences of single faculty members. Using agency as a theoretical framework, we assessed whether faculty members have different experiences in enacting agency in work-life balance based on their partner status, gender, and rank. We found single faculty members, particularly single, women associate professors, felt less agency in their ability to balance work and life than their partnered peers.

This study examined both direct and indirect associations of faculty burnout with psychosocial work environments, using the job resources-demands framework. A sample of 2,229 faculty members (57.1% male) throughout public universities in the Czech Republic completed a questionnaire comprising measures of burnout and psychosocial work environment characteristics from the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire II.