A Study on the Work-Family Balance and Job Performance of Academics in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Work-family balance is a challenging issue for many working adults. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, employees’ awareness and perception about work-family balance is very limited as compared to the western countries. Academics in Sri Lanka are no exception and they receive very little or no family-friendly support from universities as they struggle to achieve a balance between work and family with their never-ending workload. The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between university academics’ work-family balance and job performance. Further, this study aims to find the dimensional impact of workfamily balance on job performance of university academics. With the purpose of accomplishing the aforesaid objectives, a self-administered survey is carried out among 200 university academics from the four largest government universities in Sri Lanka. The sample is selected based on simple random sampling from the management faculties of the respective universities. This study finds a statistically significant positive relationship between work-family balance and job performance among academics. It also finds that a significant positive relationship exists between work-family balance dimensions and job performance. Further, satisfaction balance is identified as the major contributor to job performance