As the technological landscape and labor market demographics change, organizations are finding themselves faced with a need to act upon employees' increasing demand to better manage their work and family roles. Over the past thirty years, a vast repository of research has sought to identify what organizations do to meet this challenge and how formal and informal organizational policies and practices affect employees as well as the organizations that offer them. Despite the rise in popularity of work-family policies and practices as a research topic across academic disciplines, the focus has been on how organizational practices affect individuals. However, this research does not provide a sufficiently nuanced account of the reasoning behind and implementation of these practices and policies. In particular, researchers lack theory and schematic frameworks at the organizational level to understand how a particular work-family policy or practice is chosen or implemented, and how it fits within the broader goals of the organization. In light of this, this dissertation provides two primary contributions to the organizational-work family literature. First, it includes two empirical studies which focus on modern organizational work-family issues that are relatively poorly understood in current research. One study demonstrates the importance of organizational expectations surrounding the use of informational and communicative technology after normal work hours. This study finds that organizations pressuring employees to use information and communicative technology to work outside of normal work hours risk employee emotional exhaustion, but that individual differences in the preferences for work-family role management play a part in determining the severity of this risk. The second study discusses the importance of public policy in contextualizing organizational work-family practices by identifying Germany as a country with an under-supplied public daycare system. The study shows that in an environment where childcare is in high demand, organizations are able to step in with childcare practices that mutually benefit employees and their organizations, and that those organizations with high levels of female turnover are most likely to adopt these practices. Second, I use these two studies alongside other empirical and theoretical evidence to build a new theoretical framework for the adoption and implementation of work-family policies and practices. Previous frameworks have not been updated to include the wealth of research around organizational policies and practices and their relationship with employee and organizational outcomes, and do not allow for variation in the adoption and implementation of practices and policies. In particular, existing frameworks assume a generalized organizational response and cannot explain the complex systems of work-family policies and practice observed in actual organizations. Building an integrated organizational work-family response framework provides some much-needed organization-level theory in the work-family domain. I discuss the weaknesses of existing frameworks as well as the benefits of an integrated framework for research and practice.
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