Top Executives' Work Relationship and Work-Family Balance: Taxonomy Development and Performance Implications

212 Pages·2009·0.958 MB·German

by  Eva-Maria Bauer (auth.)

Eva-Maria Bauer
Top Executives’ Work Relationship
and Work-Family Balance
GABLER RESEARCH
Neue Perspektiven der
marktorientierten Unternehmensführung
Herausgegeben von
Professor Dr. Ruth Stock-Homburg, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Professor Dr. Jan Wieseke, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Eva-Maria Bauer
Top Executives’
Work Relationship and
Work-Family Balance
Taxonomy Development
and Performance Implications
With a foreword by Prof. Dr. Ruth Stock-Homburg
RESEARCH
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Dissertation Technische Universität Darmstadt, 2009
D 17
1st Edition 2009
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Series Foreword
Current developments like rapidly changing customers’ requirements, shortened product life
cycles, increasing globalization, and demographic change associated with skilled worker and
manager shortage present organizations with completely new challenges. The successful han-
dling of these challenges requires the development of new business management concepts.
These concepts should consider the following points:
• the increase of the companies’ market and innovation orientation (e.g., by the
adaptation of the organizational structure respectively the promotion of the
employees’ innovation and customer orientation),
• the implementation of new working principles (e.g., customer-oriented and vir-
tual global teams),
• the long-range maintenance of managers’ and employees’ employability (e.g.,
by the setup and expansion of intercultural competences as well as targeted
steps towards the promotion of the work-life balance), right up to
• the preservation and expansion of human resources (e.g., by personal market-
ing activities such as targeted steps towards the advancement of elder and fe-
male employees as organizational potential).
The variety of possible starting points shows: a scientific consideration from the viewpoint of
a single economic discipline meets these various challenges only to some extent. The series
“Neue Perspektiven der marktorientierten Unternehmensführung” is dedicated to successful
concepts of managing current and future developments in organizations’ practical experiences
and presents an interdisciplinary perspective. This interdisciplinary approach is accounted for
by a parallel illumination of different economic disciplines (i.e., marketing, innovation man-
agement, and human resource management). Additionally, the interface of different facets of
business economics and psychology (i.e., work and organizational psychology) is of particular
importance.
The dissertations being published in the series “Neue Perspektiven der marktorientierten
Unternehmensführung” orient themselves content wise and conceptually towards international
VI Series Foreword
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scientific standards. Starting from a stringent theoretical foundation the respective research
topic is qualitatively and quantitatively investigated.
The present titles deal with central questions in market-oriented business management.
Thereby the single volumes provide scientists with new insights and suggestions for their re-
search in that they approach the topics in different ways. For organizations’ practical experi-
ences the different dissertations offer implications for dealing with current and future chal-
lenges of the market-oriented business management.

Darmstadt and Bochum, January 2009 Ruth-Stock Homburg and Jan Wieseke
VII
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Foreword
The importance of top executives for the success of their organizations is virtually undisputed
for approximately three decades. For this reason, in the last years scientific papers in the area
of management and market-oriented business management increasingly dealt with answering
the question on what top executives’ success depends. Within the scope of market-oriented
business management mainly underlying circumstances (e.g, intensity of competition and
market dynamics) as well as executives’ demographic characteristics (e.g., age and tenure)
were investigated. Thereby influencing variables on the level of attitudes and behaviors re-
mained almost unregarded. Mrs. Eva-Maria Bauer closes this gap and pursues with her work
the goal to provide a deeper understanding of top executives’ psychology in order to explain
organizations’ success. In her work the author captures a rather broad management perspec-
tive. Although market-related magnitudes are considered in this work, it nevertheless is also
relevant for research in the area of market-oriented business management. Together with psy-
chological variables the author considers two phenomena which are deepened in her work:
• top executives’ relationship to their occupation in a specific organization (called top
executives’ work relationship) as well as
• the balance top executives perceive between their work and family life (called top ex-
ecutives’ work-family balance).
This work has as its goal to both theoretically and empirically investigate these two phenom-
ena. Thus, it decisively contributes to the extension of the scientific state of knowledge in
these areas. Former empirical works primarily carried out dependence analysis regarding top
executives’ relevance for organizations’ success. In contrast, the author chooses a classifica-
tion approach. For both investigated areas – top executives’ work relationship and top execu-
tives’ work-family balance – the author selects theoretically stringent and well-founded cen-
tral variables in order to describe the respective phenomenon. The existent empirical literature
multiplicatively proved differences between the occupations of diverse hierarchical levels.
The present work explicitly highlights the differences within a population which is frequently
implicitly categorized as relatively homogenous: the top executives in organizations.
At the beginning of her work, the author develops a systematic procedure for the development
of a theoretically-based taxonomy. By means of this approach, she extends previous taxo-
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nomic research, which often starts with an empirical part without in advance specifying ex-
tensive theoretical bases. Additionally, the author recommends an explorative qualitative
study prior to a quantitative empirical taxonomy development in order to better permeate lit-
tle-known and equally complex phenomena. In my opinion, the process of taxonomy devel-
opment elaborated in this work should be trend-setting for future works which underlie classi-
fications. Corresponding to this process, the author initially conducts a qualitative study and
interviews over 40 top executives about facets of their work relationship as well as character-
istics of their work-family balance. The interviews are analyzed by means of a very sophisti-
cated procedure of content analysis which is established in the leading international manage-
ment research. In the second step, the author successfully surveys around 220 top executives
regarding their work relationship and work-family balance. This relatively large sample is
remarkable because top executives are an extremely difficultly accessible target group in the
context of empirical studies. The author nevertheless manages to generate this sample by
means of a very sophisticated procedure, in which she offers the top executives an individual-
ized profound report of the results in respect to their personal work-life balance.
Beyond that, in addition to the investigation of top executives, the self assessments of their
life partners are also gathered. With her multi-methodological design as well as the dyadic
quantitative study the author succeeds in generating a data basis, which to my knowledge, in
this form, exists neither in national nor in international top management research.
On the basis of a comprehensive data set, the author develops two taxonomies concerning top
executives’ work relationship and work-family balance. Beyond that, she shows that top ex-
ecutives highly differ concerning their work relationship and their work-family balance. The
results regarding the investigated variables related to these phenomena are interesting. On the
basis of variance analysis the author shows that the top executives clearly differentiate in re-
spect to their well-being and performance. Against the background of the frequently con-
ducted debate on top executives’ relevance for the success of their organizations, the results of
this work are not only novel but also highly relevant for the economic management research.
The present work essentially extends the scientific state of knowledge involving two highly
interesting phenomena – top executives’ work relationship and work-family balance. In addi-
tion, for organizations’ practical experiences interesting insights are generated. A broad diffu-
sion in science and business practice is desirous for this thesis.

Darmstadt, July 2009 Ruth Stock-Homburg
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Acknowledgements
First of all, I must thank Prof. Ruth Stock-Homburg, Ph.D., for her many ideas and enormous
engagement in supervising me in my years as doctoral student, during which I have learned
valuable skills for life. Additionally, I thank Prof. Ralph Bruder, Ph.D., who accepted the co-
correction of this thesis.
I am very grateful to the Darmstadt Technical University for the scholarship, which enabled
me to dedicate so much time to my research. Furthermore, I thank the German Research
Foundation (DFG) for sponsoring this research project (grant number STO 477/9-1).
Particular thanks go to the executives and their life partners, who participated in my study.
With your openness and time you enabled the gathering of the data on which this thesis is
based. Additionally, I am indebted to Tilo Guter, who transcribed the interviews and typed
and re-typed the hundreds of pages that ultimately were distilled into this work.
I would like to deeply thank my dear colleagues Gisela Bieling, Julia Pescher, and Nadine
Ringwald. Without your willingness to help, suggestions, and support, this PhD thesis would
not have been written. Furthermore, thanks a lot for the hours you spent copy reading and
checking. Many thanks to Heather Lüft for proofreading my English!
I cordially thank my brother for sharing his experience with me and for all the articles he has
sent to me. Additionally, I sincerely thank our Dad for spending so much time in the last cor-
rections of this thesis.
Thanks a million to Grandma Waltraud and Grandma Barbara, who tenderly cared for Jakob,
while I have spent hour after hour writing this thesis. Most of all I thank my family, Mathias
and Jakob. For everything. I love you so much!

Ludwigsburg, August 2009 Eva-Maria Bauer
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction.......................................................................................................................1
1.1 Relevance of the Thesis...........................................................................................................1
1.1.1 Managerial Relevance.....................................................................................................1
1.1.2 Scientific Relevance........................................................................................................3
1.2 Major Goals and Structure of the Thesis.................................................................................6
2 Conceptual Background...................................................................................................9
2.1 Procedure of Taxonomy Development....................................................................................9
2.2 Literature Review..................................................................................................................12
2.2.1 Research on Top Executives.........................................................................................13
2.2.2 Research on Work Relationship....................................................................................23
2.2.3 Research on Work-Family Balance...............................................................................32
2.2.4 Specification of Investigated Phenomena......................................................................46
2.3 Theoretical Background of Top Executives’ Work Relationship Taxonomy.......................50
2.3.1 The Job Demands-Resources Model.............................................................................50
2.3.2 Upper Echelons Theory.................................................................................................55
2.3.3 Theoretical Conclusion for the Understanding of Top Executives’ Work Relationship59
2.4 Theoretical Background of Top Executives’ Work-Family Balance Taxonomy..................61
2.4.1 Role Theory...................................................................................................................61
2.4.2 Mechanisms of Work-Family Linkage..........................................................................65
2.4.3 Theoretical Conclusion for the Understanding of Top Executives’ Work-Family
Balance........................................................................................................................67
3 Basics of the Empirical Studies......................................................................................71
3.1 Qualitative Study...................................................................................................................71
3.1.1 Data Collection and Sample..........................................................................................71
3.1.2 Process of Qualitative Content Analysis.......................................................................73
3.2 Quantitative Study.................................................................................................................74
3.2.1 Data Collection and Sample..........................................................................................74
3.2.2 Process of Scale Validation...........................................................................................78