Examining the Impact of Work-Family Conflict on Organizational Commitment: Study of Higher Education Sector in Northern Cyprus

Abstract

Abstract Thesis: Examining the Impact of Work-Family Conflict on Organizational Commitment Program: Strategic Human Resource Management and Labour Relations Level: Second Cycle Semester/year: Spring Semester/2017 Supervisor: Karin Allard / Kristina Håkansson Examiner: Report No: Keyword: WFC, FWC, Affective commitment, continuance commitment, Northern Cyprus Purpose: This study examined the impact of work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC) on two forms of organizational commitment, namely affective commitment and continuance commitment on full-time academic staff of two universities in Northern Cyprus. Theory: Two main theories have been tested in the current study; one for Organizational commitment and one for Work-Family Conflict Concept. The organizational commitment has been operationalized by the Three Component Model by Meyer and Allen (1991) and work-family conflict concept (WFCC) has been operationalized by the integrative model of Gutek et al. (1991). An addition to that, social identity theory has been used as an explanation for the current results. Method: 300 random selected academic employees have been reached from five departments in two universities; engineering, health, education, art and science and business and economics. Hard-copy questionnaires have been distributed and in total, 192 of them have been returned with a response rate of 64%. Result: Results revealed that the two main independent variables, WFC and FWC have a weak influence on two forms organizational commitment (affective and continuance) in the Northern Cypriot context. Gender did not moderate the relationship between WFCC and organizational commitment. Furthermore, two control variables, age and perceived organizational support (POS) suggested an additional explanation for organizational commitment. Specifically, age has been found to have a strong negative influence on continuance commitment and POS has moderate positive influence on affective commitment for Northern Cypriot context.