A Study on Work Family Balance and Its Impact on Organizational Commitment Among the Medical Sales Representatives of Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Work and family are extremely important components of people‟s lives and health. It seems reasonable to consider that most people strive toward experiencing happy, healthy and productive family and work life. The global trend of increased labour force participation, coupled with the prevalence of dual-earner and single-parent families, has precipitated considerable research interest in these emergent family forms to manage their work and family responsibilities. Higher incomes and urbanizations are likely to have a significant impact on family structures in India. Among the world‟s population, India is ranked in the second place. Moreover, in India, the second biggest and thickly populated state is Tamil Nadu. According to the census of 2011, the population of Tamil Nadu is rated at 72,147,030 million. Of which, for the last ten years the population has risen to 97.4 lakhs. As the population increases pollution also increase leading to various disease. As diseases increase, Pharma companies also play a major role to meet the market demand. As the pharmaceutical industries are growing day by day, the need for the pharmaceutical sales representatives is also increasing simultaneously. This in turn has increased the pressure of achieving targets among medical sales representatives. This work pressure impacts on the nature of the job which eventually leads to job induced stress among the pharmaceutical sales representatives. It is evident from a research that pharmaceutical sales representatives are at increased risk of ill health due to this stress related demands of their work. Previous researches also indicated that pharmaceutical sales representatives are exposed to long working hours, prolonged driving and manual handling of the promotional materials. The difficult part of their 6 job is to explain to the doctors about the details of the medicines succinctly and in a convincing manner. Most of the people are earning good money in the midst of these challenges, despite their job being filled with emotional stress and less satisfaction towards work and family. The goal of this study is to develop a better conceptual understanding of work–family balance. The main purpose of this study is to explore the relationship of work-family conflict, work-family enrichment and work-family satisfaction on work-family balance and to identify its impact on organizational commitment. The researcher seeks to explore the pharma sales persons‟ difficulties in managing work-family relationship along with their organizational commitments. This study tries to give an overall picture of the medical sales representatives‟ work and family role balance at a given point of time by adopting a cross-sectional descriptive research design for the study. The study has adopted a quantitative approach to its research work. The population includes all the Medical sales representatives of Tamil Nadu. The respondents to the survey that enabled this study include only married men who are being employed as full-time medical sales representatives. The samples were collected using snowball sampling method. The primary research was carried out through survey methods. A well structured questionnaire was used for data collection and about 415 responses were sought from the medical sales representatives. Based on the response to the research questions, a hypothesis was framed and proved using statistical tools. The statistical techniques such as mean, standard deviation, analysis of variance, correlation, regression and structural equation method were used to analyze the research objective of the study. The study identified that Medical sales representative (MSRs) who was exposed to more of role stress due to long working hours and prolonged waiting hours than the ordinary type who don‟t opt for a rigorous work schedule. As medical sales representatives experience high role stress, this stress affects the 7 increase in their work-family conflict because of the stressful target related to the job which they face in their routine life. While the MSRs suffer from more of a work-to-family conflict than a family-to-work conflict, they have also experience more of a family-to-work enrichment than a work-to-family enrichment. This enrichment received from family has helped them in performing their work-task successfully thus experiencing more of a work satisfaction than of a family satisfaction. MSRs experience only a moderate amount of work-family balance and organizational commitment. Medical sales executives, older than 50 years were more satisfied with their family and work than those of younger ones. People with more experience were more committed and received more work support from their organization than the other group, who had less than 10 years of experience. Education was not a significant factor in describing the difference among the medical sales representatives in their work-family balance. Joint family showed higher family support than that of a nuclear family. The respondents with no children or one child showed higher work satisfaction than those who have more children. The respondents‟ spouses with employment or doing business reported less satisfaction in work and family than those whose spouses were only house wives. Time spent at work variable showed statistical differences in work-to-family conflict, work satisfaction and workfamily balance. Respondents who spent more than 10 hours per day at home were more satisfied in the family and more supportive than the other groups. The number of working hours is an important factor in influencing the satisfaction of work and family. Work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict has negative correlation with all the variables, whereas all the other variables have positive correlation with each other. The researcher framed 6 path models to develop a better understanding of the variables. On the whole, MSR work-family balance and organizational commitment increases, when the respondents enrichment and satisfaction in both the domains (work and family) increase at 8 the same time when conflict from both the domains (work and family) gets reduced. The study proves that all the variables- conflict, enrichment, satisfaction, balance and commitment are dependent on each other for its existence. In conclusion, this research offers a spade work for further theoretical and empirical investigation in the area of work family areas. By creating a measure of balance as a skill or ability possessed by individual employees, the distinctness of several common work–family concepts are established (conflict, enrichment, and satisfaction). Furthermore, results suggest that, the variables are conceptualized and measured in this way; the balance thus establishes and leads to valuable organizational and individual outcomes.