Self-Employment, Work-Family Conflict and Work-Family Synergy: Antecedents and Consequences‪.‬

Work and family variables, and particularly the interference of these roles, have received extensive attention in the literature (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985). A great deal is known about the antecedents (Byron, 2005) and consequences (Allen, Herst, Bruck and Sutton, 2000) of work-family conflict, as these recent reviews have shown. Yet, most of what is known about work and family relates to employees in corporate or other settings. Very little attention has been given to those who are self-employed. The few studies that have focused specifically on the self-employed have used small and/or convenience samples, raising possible issues of external validity of the results (Jamal, 2001; Loscocco, 1997; Parasuraman, Purohit, Godshalk and Beutell, 1996; Parasuraman and Simmers, 2001). As the ranks of the self-employed increase (Hipple, 2004), more research on work and family variables is clearly warranted. The present study was undertaken to address this need, using self-employed participants for a national probability sample. This study examines both the conflict (work interfering with family, WIF, and family interfering with work, FIW) and the work-family synergy (W-FS) perspectives. The interference perspective finds support in the work of Parasuraman et al. (1996). This study revealed the significance of examining both types of conflict (WIF, FIW) among the self-employed. Synergy is the term used in the present study to describe how work and family, acting in concert, can create beneficial feelings and outcomes that are greater than the effects each are able to create independently. The synergy perspective finds support in recent theoretical work (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006) and in theoretical explanations of the attractiveness of self-employment, the presumed flexibility to facilitate the interaction of work and family (Friedman and Greenhaus, 2000). Friedman and Greenhaus (2000) argued that self-employment affords the possibility of a more family-friendly work place and offers more control of virtually all aspects of employment than the corporate sector. Empirical support for the concept of W-FS among the self-employed has been reported (Beutell, 2005). Antecedent Variables