Coping Strategies Adopted by Dual Career Couples in IT Sector in India – A Case Study
Gurvinder Kaur1 , Prof. Dr. Raj Kumar2
1Assistant Professor, K.L. Mehta Dayanand College for Women
2Professor, Institute of Management Science and Research, Mahrshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, India
*Corresponding Author E-mail: geetu365@gmail.com
ABSTRACT:
With the increasing influx of women in IT sector work-life challenges has also increased. Many working couples are facing an imbalance between work and family domain. They are adopting both healthy and unhealthy coping strategies to strike a balance between work and life. They are going for flexitime working strategy, self-absorbed outlook strategy, spousal and social support for coping these work-life challenges.
KEY WORDS: work-life, coping strategy, balance, IT sector, working couples.
Due to fast growing IT sector in USA, there was a need for IT professional outside USA. India had a huge number of educated people and the education in India being in English, there was a large population of English speaking technically strong people in India. Hence outsourcing of work started gaining momentum and this led to the huge boom in the IT sector in India, whose most of the work is exporting software and software services to the US and other overseas clients.
The first major IT reform by the Indian government was the creation of corporation called STPI (Software Technology Parks in India). The Indian IT sector got escalated at gain of nearly 50% every year. Today India is known as the IT hub of the world. It has provided employment to more than 30 lacs Indians and has become a source of Income for more than 2 crore Indians indirectly.
Presently, India is more vulnerable with two-third of the exports of the $150 billion IT industry to the US, which will indirectly affect the work--life domains of employees working in IT sector. It’s quite evident from the emerging work-life challenges faced by dual career couple that enlarged working hours, physical and emotional stress, time conflicts and working overtime leads to work-family conflict. An advent IT sector comes with greater contribution to India’s GDP, also contributing to present work-life challenges faced by dual career couple. These couples are facing mental health issues because of family time. Therefore, to tackle such mire situation, various coping strategies has been adopted by dual career couple working in IT sector. These strategies include active utilization of personal and societal resources in response to work pressure they face in their daily life. It has been observed that continuous work interference with family life necessitates more help from spouse in order to manage their multiple roles. While the overall workload keeps on rising by spending 14-15 hours on their laptops or PC’s, they adopt various unhealthy coping strategies to reduce stress and tension using drugs, alcohols, over-eating. Using these wrong strategies they are actually impeding the process to reduce stress. Though most of the couples working in IT sector experienced that latter mentioned unhealthy coping strategies may not remove work-life imbalance constraints. They are now more inclined towards healthy coping strategies such as elderly parent support, domestic helper support, employer’s support and organization supportive work-life balance policies (Banwell Wilson (2006)). DCC are now looking for social support from the supervisor and supportive organization culture and climate. In addition to this they are looking for each other’s support (spousal support) in order to balance both the domains well. Many research studies even concluded that higher level of spousal support leads to the higher level of job satisfaction among dual career couple. Similarly coping strategies are also adopted by dual career couples with children; they go for domestic helper who helps to eliminate a lot of household and childcare pressure. Also they go for home tutors for their kids and place their kids in international schools to reduce excessive homework. These days DCC of IT sectors go with both productive and non-productive strategies (Parasuraman, S., Greenhaus, J., Rabinowitz, S., Bedeian, A. and Mussholder, A. (1989)). Non-productive strategies such as give up sleep, give up social life or dumping up of the community participation activities and productive strategies include training children to be independent, spousal support (Selvarajan, T.T. (Rajan), Cloninger, Peggy, Singh, Barjinder, (2013)), job sharing, better time management, adjusting role task, personal role redefinition, prioritising roles to deal with WFC.
OUTCOMES:
Most of the employees working in IT sector believe that instead of saying “no” to boss its better to postpone the task so as to give time to family. Indirectly they are adopting task prolonged strategy which means forward planning and organizing their tasks into manageable chunks. It is widely believed that job sharing plays a high profile role for them to balance out their work and family roles. In particular, DCC revealed the importance of working part-time instead of working full-time. They also mentioned that they prefer to take time-off instead of payments for working hours. They are actually focussing on flexitime working strategy which is an important part of work-life balance strategy. Self-absorbed outlook strategy (Kaur Gurvinder, Kumar Raj, (2015)) is also being experienced by working couples giving positive effects on work role. Under this strategy employers adopt individual coping strategy for their family needs and to solve the problems. This strategy includes dumping of community activities, avoidance of unwanted social obligations giving a clear picture of individual’s decision to cope with the work-life challenges. Undoubtedly social support and family support are the most important pillars for easing out the life of DCC.
WAY FORWARD:
There should be proper implementation of work-life balance policies by organization.
Supervisors should be more sensitive towards DCC needs and wants to carry out their daily routines smoothly. It’s a high time to make HR people aware about not only drafting these work-life balance strategies but also making them functional for DCC.
REFERENCES:
1. Banwell, Wilson, (2006), “Under Pressure: Implications of Work-Life Balance and Job stress”, Human Solutions™ Report, Proact solutions Humaines.
2. Parasuraman, S., Greenhaus, J., Rabinowitz, S., Bedeian, A. and Mussholder, A., (1989), “Work and Family Variables As Mediators of The Relationship Between Wives' Employment And Husbands' Well-Being”, Academy of Management Journal, 32, pp. 185-201.
3. Selvarajan, T.T. (Rajan), Cloninger, Peggy, Singh, Barjinder., (2013), “Social Support and Work-Family Conflict: A Test of an Indirect Effects Model”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 83, pp 486-499.
4. Kaur Gurvinder, Kumar Raj, (2015), “Work-Life Challenge Of Dual Career Couples And Related Coping Strategies In Corporate Sector”, PhD thesis, IMSAR, Mahrshi Dayanad University.
Received on 04.04.2017 Modified on 14.04.2017
Accepted on 21.05.2017 © A&V Publications all right reserved
Asian J. Management; 2017; 8(3):483-484.
DOI: 10.5958/2321-5763.2017.00077.4