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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2338545
Management and Administrative Sciences Review www.absronline.org/masr
ISSN: 2308-1368
Volume: 2, Issue: 5, Pages: 575-582 (2013)
© 2013 Academy of Business & Scientific Research
*Corresponding author: John. N. N. Ugoani, Ph.D.,
Coordinator, College Of Management and Social Sciences,
Department of Management Sciences Rhema University 153 – 155, Aba Owerri Road, P. M. B. 7021, Aba, Abia State Nigeria
E-Mail: drjohnugoani@yahoo.com
575
Research Paper
Emotional Intelligence and Balancing Work-Family-Conflict among
Dual-Career-Parents in Nigeria
John. N. N. Ugoani, Ph.D.
Coordinator, College Of Management and Social Sciences, Department of Management Sciences Rhema University,
Abia State, Nigeria.
The research was designed to assess the influence of emotional intelligence (EI) in
balancing work-family conflict (WFC) among dual career parents in Nigeria, and
propose strategies for enhancing it. Emotional intelligence is believed to be more crucial
than general intelligence in terms of career success. Emotional intelligence refers to how
well an individual handles herself and others rather than how smart she is or how
capable she is in terms of technical skills. The survey research method was used and two
methods were used for data generation. Data generated from the 476 respondents in Aba,
Owerri and Umuahia, South-East Nigeria were analyzed through tables, frequencies,
percentages and the Chi-Square (X2) statistics. It was found that Emotional Intelligence
is essential for balancing work-family conflict among dual-career parents in Nigeria. Five
(5) recommendations were made based on the findings of this research.
Keywords: Work-family; Emotional intelligence; Role theory; Paradigm shift;
Dual-career; Career-cycle;
BACKGROUND
Role conflict is described as the psychological
tension that is aroused by conflicting role
pressures. Role theory suggests that conflict occurs
when individuals engage in multiple roles that are
incompatible (Kahn, 1990, 1998). Although work
continues to be an important part of our lives, it
has declined in its importance in recent years due
to rapid changes in the socio-economic
environment. Now many workers desire an
organization of work or work pattern that
acknowledges and to a great deal, recognizes what
they must do, and desire to do, to earn their living
for the rest of their lives. The new generation of the
workforce desires stress-free work organization.
Work is no longer the inflexible core around which
parts of life must bend. Women have to contend
with their ever-demanding family roles of child
rearing, housekeeping, in addition to their
managerial responsibilities. Because of the
limitedness of time, and since one‟s time is not
limitless, involvement in multiple roles, often leads
to stress and inter role conflict in work-family role.
Inter role conflict can be positive or negative. It is
positive when a particular role is satisfied and
negative when a competing need remains
unsatisfied. The satisfaction of one role such as the
work role leads the depletion of the family role,
and vice-versa. There is a growing preference for
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2338545
Emotional Intelligence and Balancing Work-Family-Conflict Research Paper
576
alternative lifestyle, more self-control, and more
interesting quality of work-life and family life. This
has become a reality because of the influx of
women and teenagers into the workforce, a
reduction in the number of older workers, the
increasing educational levels of employees, rising
levels of affluence, and the need for some
minimum economic security, which allows
workers to be more selective and autonomous.
Two major ways that organizations tend to
accommodate these new trends are by improving
on their managerial ability and quality of work life
and giving women more autonomy and alternative
work arrangements for workers. These initiatives
aim at reducing conflict in the workplace. Being
able to influence worker‟s behavior to produce
good performance and win their loyalty at the
same time requires a considerable measure of
social ingenuity on the part of the manager.
Emotional Intelligence (EI relates to the ability to
manage conflict and to succeed in a given
situation. It encompasses the power to control
one‟s emotions and perceive emotions in others,
adapt to change, show empathy, collaborate with
others and manage adversity. The idea of
emotional intelligence lies in some basic variables
that suggest intelligent behavior; thus indicating a
relationship and interaction of the emotional and
thinking brains. Goleman (1995) posits that
emotionally intelligent people also do things like
delay gratification, they are optimistic and
generally positive. Creativity, persuasiveness,
resilience, love, and even the abstract factor of
spirituality are among the fine attributes of
emotional intelligence. Many careers fail not
because of lack of high intelligence quotient (IQ)
but due to, lack of psychological skills. Lack of
such essential human skills, transmutes to lack of
emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998, Salovey
and Mayer 1990). Conflict management skills may
be more a reflection of emotional intelligence than
of intelligence quotient.
According to Nelson and Quick (2003), people
who lack emotional intelligence, especially
empathy, the ability to see life from another
person‟s perspective are more likely to be causes of
conflict of various types, but probably fail to
recognize the variety of conflict that occur in
organizations as a result of work-family role in-
balance. Conflict may be defined as any situation
in which incompatible goals, attitudes, emotions or
behaviours lead to disagreement or opposition
between two or more parties – such as work-
family-conflict. Contemporary organizations are
placing greater attention on conflict management
more than ever before. The workplace with its
increasing competition and globalization,
magnifies differences among people in terms of
personality, values, attitudes, perceptions,
languages, religions, cultures among others. With
the amazing diversity of the workforce, also comes
the smallest component when placed side by side
other traditional institutions of the society such as
community or Local Authority, State and the
Federal Governments. But the family remains the
most crucial for our existence. Since the family is
acknowledged as a reflection of the larger society,
individuals now pay greater attention to family
matters as a matter of necessity. According to
Flippo (1982), climbing the organizational ladder
of success is becoming less important than
sacrificing one‟s family for the good of the
organization. The two-career lifestyle has
increased in recent years due in one hand to the
advancement in knowledge and on the other hand
to the need for two incomes to maintain a certain
status in living. (Boyatzis, 1994, Cherniss, 2000,
Cherniss & Mitllel, 2000, Frone, Yarley & Markel,
1997, Hellriegel, Slocum & Woodman, 2001,
Kinnumen & Mauno, 1998, Kossek & Ozeki,1998).
Dual-career parents face work-family conflict
through the career cycle. Experiencing a great deal
of work-family conflicts can lead to emotional
exhaustion. Attending to customers‟ needs, official
complaints, failure to meet official targets can
create negative behaviors at home and vice-versa.
Responsibilities at home (family) can clash with
responsibilities at work and these work family
conflicts must be planned for. For example, Nelson
and Quick (2003) report that the result of a
research they did on work-family conflict at Elililly
& Co. in USA, only 35 percent of workers said it
was possible to get ahead in their careers and still
devote sufficient time to family. Work-family-
conflicts are particularly problems for working
mothers.
Women have been always at the fore front to share
family roles more than men, such as child rearing,
Manag. Adm. Sci. Rev.
ISSN: 2308-1368
Volume: 2, Issue: 5, Pages: 575-582
John. N. N. Ugoani
caring for elderly relatives among others. For
instance in Nigeria today men are assuming the
responsibility of taking their children to school and
bringing them back (school run). When dual-career
couples experience work-family-conflict their
performance declines, and they suffer more strain.
Work-family-conflict is bi-directional in which case
work interferes with family versus family-work
conflict in which family or home life interferes
with work. Quality of life is now preferred to
quantity equity to efficiency, diversity to
conformity and the individual to the organization.
Male careers are becoming increasingly similar to
the traditional fragmented pattern of women‟s
careers and many men are generally keener to
develop careers which take account of personal
and family needs including children‟s education,
partner‟s career and quality of life. (Foley &
Powell, 1997) Emotional Intelligence as the
strongest indicator of human success is an
inescapable ingredient for building flourishing
careers and lasting meaningful work-family
relationships; because the decline of the traditional
family and the increase in dual-career couples and
working single parents places more stress on
employees to balance family and work
responsibilities. (Lambert, 1990, Mickovich &
Boudreau each, Torrington, Hall & Taylor, 2005,
Ugoani, 2013, 2008).
Statement of the Problem
An individual has various roles in life, like
breadwinner, husband or wife family member,
church volunteer, community leader or more, only
one of which is typically associated with work.
These roles may present conflicting demands that
become sources of work-family-conflict. Also,
work typically meets only some parts of an
individual‟s goals, thus presenting additional
sources of work-family-conflict. For example,
employees personal desires to spend more time
with families may conflict with the extra hours
they must work to advance their careers thereby
posing a serious work-family-conflict. The
increasingly high numbers of dual-career couples
has made the study of work-family-conflict
imperative in Nigeria since almost all previous
works in the area focused on U. S. A. and Europe.
Hypotheses
The following hypotheses were formulated for the
study and tested at 0.01 level of significance.
H0: EI has no significant influence on work family
conflict
Hi: EI has significant influence on work family conflict
Delimitation of Study
The study was delimited to Aba, Owerri and
Umuahia South East Nigeria, because of the high
density of dual-career families in the areas.
Limitation of the Study
The study was constrained by time factor and
finance due to lack of research grant.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In the 1950s/60s the average Nigerian family lived
a simple family life in a comfortable suburban or
urban house, where the father mostly worked to
support the family, and the mother stayed at home
to clean the house, cook, look after old relatives
and raise the children. The father as the sole
breadwinner worked round the clock and comes
home only in the evening, and sometimes in the
night to join the family. Today less than 10 percent
of families fit into this life style. Things have so
changed and families, particularly the dual-career
couples are split into many smaller segments, such
as unmarried couples living together, fathers or
mothers heading families alone, while still
working to earn salaries, trying to raise children,
getting involved in taking care of elderly relatives
and other life activities. Situations like this give
rise to work-family conflict. Work-family conflict
(WFC) is very common among dual-career parents
because they play several different roles in their
lives and must deal with groups of other persons
holding contrary expectations about their
behaviours both at work and at home. At work the
mother whose husband or partner is equally at
work is concerned about what is happening at
home, and the father whose wife is at work will be
concerned about how to pick the children from
school back home and return to work. These role
pressures present a serious source of conflict
between work and family for dual-career parents
and unfortunately there is no best way of
Emotional Intelligence and Balancing Work-Family-Conflict Research Paper
578
reconciling the conflict in favour of any one
direction. (Agulanna & Agulanna, 2008). Foley &
Powell (1997) opine that work-family-conflict is a
type of inter-role-conflict in which the work life
requires more attention of an individual than his
family life or vice-versa, meaning that both are not
accorded the demanded attention. Therefore the
role pressures from the work and family domains
are mutually incompatible in some instances. They
suggest that conflict between work and family is
bi-directional which means work interference with
family (WIF) and family interference with work
(FIW) and that both are strongly correlated.
According to Flippo (1982) there is a growing body
of evidence that work ethics is declining in favour
of a more existential view of life. That instead of
organizations providing the basic guides to living,
individuals are now responsible for exploring and
determining for themselves, what they value to do,
and what they wish to become. And with this
philosophy, work becomes only one alternative-
among many life involvements as a means of
becoming what an individual wants to become.
Consequently, roles in the family, leisure and other
engagements like government assignments, church
programmes, and school and community activities
are equally alternative ways through which an
individual can also find bliss and ultimately
becomes self-actualized. In the emerging trend,
successful organizations would be those that strive
to integrate the interests of the organization with
those of the employees and society. Recognizing
the constant challenges most employees face in
efforts to balance work-family-conflict is critical to
recruiting and retaining top workers essential to
manage successful organizations. For organization
to handle work-family conflict successfully, they
must understand all the interactions that can occur
among employees and other people, whether they
are conflicts or cooperative behaviours. They need
interpersonal relationships that go well beyond
strategies for influencing the behavior of others to
providing a process for creating clear
communication, effective collaboration and
partnerships that help in achieving results. This
new paradigm shift requires relationships which
connotes knowing yourself, understanding others,
developing trust and credibility. It is interwoven
with developing listening and questioning skills,
and the capacity to solve difficult issues and build
a highly collaborative link with others throughout
a career. Fortunately, these are the essential
ingredients of the concept of emotional
intelligence, the new science of success. (Halloran,
1978). According to Mathis and Jackson (1994)
balancing family and work demands is a
significant challenge for many US workers. They
opine that just as the work force and population
have become more diverse, so too have the living
patterns and household composition of families.
They presented data showing that the number of
married couples who are childless or without
children living at home exceeds couples with
children at home by 3million and that about 58%
of all married couples are dual career couples,
representing 30.3million couples. These statistics if
applied across the board suggest that the
traditional family (the father worked, the mother
stayed at home, and there were several children)
exists only in some families of today. Even though
work family balance seems an illusive goal and
one that is unattainable, but emotional intelligence
if understood and applied could perform the
magic of balancing work-family-conflict. Despite
the fact that most of the works related to the
influence of emotional intelligence in the work
place are in relation to USA and Europe, there is
the need now to advance the knowledge to
developing countries like Nigeria, because of over
whelming evidence that it leads to conflict
resolution and mutual benefits.
According to Bar-On (1997) EI focuses on an array
of emotional and social abilities, including, the
ability to be aware of, understand and express
ourselves, and relate well to others, the ability to
deal with strong emotions and the ability to adapt
to change and solve problems of a social or
personal nature. He hypothesizes that those
individuals with higher than average EI are in
general more successful in meeting environmental
demands and pressures. He also notes that a
deficiency in emotional intelligence can mean a
lack of success and the existence of emotional
problems.
At present, a complex web of demographic and
economic factors makes the balancing art between
Manag. Adm. Sci. Rev.
ISSN: 2308-1368
Volume: 2, Issue: 5, Pages: 575-582
John. N. N. Ugoani
work and family life very challenging for
businesses at both local and international levels.
Today there are more women in the world of
business than many years ago, more dual-income
families, more single parents an aging population
that gives mid-career employees day care or
elderly care responsibilities, or both. On the
economic level, years of downsizing and corporate
cost-cutting have given employees heavier work
loads that sometimes have negative implications
on business success. Kreitner and Kinick (2004)
report a unique 25 year study of values in the USA
stating: “employees have become less concerned
that work should be an important part of one‟s life
or that working hard makes one a better person”.
This is best on the thinking that too often the
family suffers due to work interference. Work-
family conflict has serious psychological
implications for both business and administration,
and leads to obvious dysfunctional conflict. For
example, according to The Punch (2012), Serbia‟s
NATO Envoy committed suicide because his
psychological need of living together with his wife
and son was not achieved due to work
interference. Kreitner and Kinick (2004) report that
a survey of 30 Massachusetts law firms revealed
that about 35 percent to 50 percent of law firm
associates left their employment within 3 years of
entry because the firms did not accommodate their
family needs. Since we cannot have a conflict free
environment, it is of necessity to strike a balance,
and to be effective there must be in place and
emotionally intelligent business organization. A
business organization that understands other
people‟s perspective, perceptions and able to
manage relationships warmly, will be more
successful. Goleman (1998) posits that emotional
intelligence provides an excellent platform for
conflict resolution. Balancing work and family
roles is critical in promoting healthy work-family
relationships, in tandem with the vision of the
international family life programme celebrated on
the 15th of May all over the world. (Alugbuo, 2003,
Bar-On, 2006, Biernat, 1997, Burkey, 1989).
METHODOLOGY
The survey research method was used for the
study. A stratified sampling technique of banks,
hospitals, educational institutions, government
ministries and agencies, breweries and other
establishments was used to select 476 respondents
for the study. Data were generated through self-
administered questionnaire and personal informal
in depth interviews. These methods were used so
as to complement, supplement and validate the
data generated through each other. The data
generated were filtered for the purposes of
checking possible errors and omissions and
remedying them to ensure accuracy, consistency,
and adequacy, thereafter they were coded and
classified. Data were analyzed on one hand
through tables, frequencies and percentages, and
on the other hand by using Chi-square (X2)
statistic with the alpha set at 0.01 level of
significance, and the investigator formed opinions,
recommendations and conclusions consequent on
the findings of the research. The X2 formula used
was:
X2 = ∑(O1 – E1)2
n=1 E1
Presentation of Result and Discussion
Npar Tests
Chi-Square Test
TABLES 1 & 2 HERE
a.0 cells (.0%) have expected frequencies less than
5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 95.2.
From the Chi-Square test in table 2, it was noted
that the calculated value of 389.546 was
significantly greater than the table value of 13.28 at
0.01 level of significance with 4 degrees of
freedom. Therefore, by this empirical result it was
accepted that emotional intelligence is critical in
balancing work-family-conflict in Nigeria. By
implication of this finding, it was agreed that
emotional intelligence, a dispositional variable, is
indeed needed for career success. This result
supports the views of Jones and George (2003) that
emotional intelligence is needed in organizations
to instill high levels of trust and cooperation while
maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing
conditions. Career management or success is a
lifelong process of learning about ourselves, jobs,
and organizations, setting personal career goals,
developing strategies for achieving the goals; and
Emotional Intelligence and Balancing Work-Family-Conflict Research Paper
580
raising the goals based on work and life
experiences. The balance between individuals and
organizations in terms of managing careers has
changed in recent times. Individuals now take on
more responsibilities for managing their own
careers-balancing work-family responsibilities.
With this paradigm shift, the people who will be
most successful in their careers are individuals
who have acquired multiple skills, self-reliant,
flexible, team-oriented, adapt to change, empathic,
among other emotional intelligence variables. The
result of this baseline research also supports the
views of Nelson and Quick (2003) that the practice
of having people work to exhaustion and at the
expense of the family leads to burnout and
turnover. They believe also that turnover does not
have to be a way of life, and that there can be a
committed relationship between the employee and
the employer. They posit that emotional
intelligence is a catalyst for career success.
SCOPE FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Further research should focus on the imperatives
of EI on corruption in Nigeria to explore whether it
will help in reducing the menace.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. The Federal Government of Nigeria through the
Federal Ministry of labour and productivity
should initiate a legislation to encourage family-
friendly work polices. This may reduce turnover.
2. Work-family balance needs a supportive
organizational-culture that has sympathetic values
and practices at its core. Therefore, organizations,
particularly the organized private sector (OPS)
should evolve discernable work-family balance
policies, as a way of improving productivity.
3. With the new career paradigm dual career
parents should choose occupations that best suit
their needs, values and abilities. This will help in
reducing work-family conflict in their careers.
4. Dual-career parents should develop multiple
skills that encompass emotional intelligence, such
as flexibility, resilience, self-reliance among others.
This will help them in building a successful career
because emotional intelligence can be developed
and tends to improve throughout life.
5. Employers of labour should continually hone
the skills of their employees because it will
transmute to occupational excellence. Employees
are expected to add value and help the
organization remain competitive by being
innovative and creative.
CONCLUSIONS
Literature provides evidence that emotional
intelligence is important in balancing work-family
responsibilities. Before entering new careers
individuals should choose such occupations that
best reflect their values and abilities. Acquiring
multiple skills is expedient in the new paradigm to
ensure flourishing and successful work-family life.
Work-family balance practices have been shown to
reduce absenteeism and also related to higher
organizational performance such that governments
and organizations now deem it necessary to abide
with them. Arrangements to accommodate work-
family demands have to be clear enough to the
parties involved since work-family balance is not a
women‟s agenda. Human resource managers need
to reengineer career systems to meet needs for
work-family balance or risk losing their most
talented employees.
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AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
John N. N. Ugoani, holds a Ph.D degree in
management. He is a lecturer at Rhema University
and teaches courses on business, management,
production management, human resource
management, industrial relations, psychology and
industrial psychology. He is listed among Ten Top
Authors by Social Science Research Network
(SSRN) New York. His present research interests
are in the areas of emotional intelligence,
managerial psychology, bank management, as well
as conflict management.
