Challenging the Dominant Paradigm
By Nancy Moffitt
Professor Nancy Rothbard takes on the work/family debate, with some surprising findings.
Nancy Rothbard recalls being startled, time and time
again, when executives she interviewed for a Harvard
research project repeatedly revealed the very personal
details of their lives.
It was the early 1990s, and Rothbard had just graduated
from Brown University. She had taken a research
post with Harvard leadership guru John Kotter, who
was working on a study about the class of 1974 MBA
graduates, work that ultimately became the bestselling
book The New Rules. Rothbard traveled across the
nation interviewing the alumni, most of whom were
successful male executives.
"As I did the interviews, I was struck by the fact that non-work subjects like divorces and problems with
kids kept creeping into the conversation," says Rothbard, 34, an assistant professor of management. "I'll
never forget one interview with a senior executive of a very large manufacturing firm. He told me that he
hadn't been able to concentrate for the last six months because his son had a drug problem, and he and his
wife were distraught and didn't know what to do. I was thinking to myself as I listened that I couldn't believe
these people were telling me these things, and that they were linking them to their work."
Having grown up in a family business, Rothbard had
witnessed such work/personal life connections interplay
with, and sometimes interrupt and disrupt, employees' work.
But she'd suspected major corporations and their senior leadership
were simply too focused on the big picture to be
affected in any significant way by their own or their employees'
personal matters.
Had she been wrong? She spent the next decade finding out.
Facts of (Work/Family) Life
The work/family debate is nothing new. For decades,
the media has talked of the impossibility of it all, of scheduled
lives and exhausted parents, drained employees and
family-wary employers, of tradeoffs, the "juggling act," "the
balancing act." Women in particular are often cast in a sympathetic
but harried light, unable to manage the challenges
of lives too full – days overflowing with tasks at home and
at work with little or no time to rest and recreate. The academic
and government research literature has taken a similar
bent, often focusing on the likely fallout to the children
and employers of the work/family set.
Rothbard, who grew up working in her family's
Philadelphia office supply and furniture business, was
intrigued by the parallels between her work at Harvard and
her early observations driving to and from work with her
father, listening to him worry about employees' lack of focus.
"A perennial question that plagued us was how to get
employees to fully engage in their work," she says. "When
people were engaged, they were more likely to catch mistakes,
come up with creative solutions, and be more com-mitted
and less likely to leave a job."
After three years, two books, and three case studies at
Harvard, her mind was filled with ideas, hunches, and questions.
Are people with active and demanding personal lives
inherently less focused and more likely to become drained
and depleted on the job? Are employees who can work long
hours and become more psychologically invested in an organization
– people without families or other consuming personal
interests – a safer and better bet? Rothbard began her
search for answers in 1993, when she entered the University
of Michigan's PhD program. And her findings have been
far different than the academic and popular literature would
have us believe – far different, even, than her early anecdotal
observations.
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