Employee Families and Organizations as Mutually Enacted Environments: A Sensemaking Approach to Work—Life Interrelationships
Abstract
Work—life research tends to privilege the organization—employee relationship, with the family's role largely relegated to providing emotional and material support to the employee and adapting to organizational requirements. Systems oriented research, however, points toward a larger role for the family, including mediating the employee's relationship with the organization as well as direct organizational interactions. This study uses Weick's model of organizational sensemaking to examine, through the analysis of employee and family interview accounts, how a global high-tech organization and its employees' families enact one another as environments. Three dynamics of mutual enactments— two cooperative and one competitive—were identified, along with implications for work—life integration research and practice, for more traditionally programmatic work—life accommodations, and for families' management of their relationships to employing organizations.
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1.
1. All managers' interviews contained both types of discourse, discourse in which they spoke of themselves in first-person plural, representing the organization, and of other employees as “they” (as in “We want good people, we value good people and we know that to have people be productive here, they have to have balance in their lives and they have to be, have a good life at home”) and discourse in which they spoke of being subject to organizational authority, frequently referencing a nonspecific “they” (as in “You know, they don't like that I leave at 4 o'clock”).
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2. For example, just after the end of the fiscal year, a time of intense activity in this publicly traded company, DataTech holds a celebration for all its headquarters employees that includes food, an open bar, and music featuring the CEO's band. In addition, employees described a variety of activities organized at the department level; some of these were casual on-site events like Wednesday afternoon popcorn and a drawing for movie tickets, whereas others were more elaborate off-site events like outings to the local horseracing track or bowling.
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3. In fact, Barnett (1998) observes that a widespread weakness of work—life research is the tendency to overly focus on women and to exclude men, a concern echoed by Hill, Hawkins, Martinson, and Ferris (2003), whose research on fathers in a global high-tech organization represents a contribution to redressing this imbalance.
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Article first published online: February 1, 2009
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