A Study on Work Family Conflict, Family Work Conflict and Emotional Exhaustion of Employees in Hospitality Industry

Work-Family Conflict is a particular concern in the hospitality industry due to long, irregular and unsocial working hours. It is widely recognised that frontline employees in the hospitality industry experiences difficulties in balancing the demands of work and family roles. The present study has been conducted with the purpose to examine the work family conflict, family work conflict and emotional exhaustion experienced by the employees and the relationship of demographic variables of employees? with the work family conflict. family work conflict and emotional exhaustion. Further the relationship of work family conflict and family work conflict with emotional exhaustion has also been studied. The area of present study has been the hotels in the Shimla town of Himachal Pradesh. The data has been collected using convenient sampling from 113 employees of different hotels. The primary data for this study has been collected with the help of pre-structured questionnaire. The pre-structured questionnaire used in the study is the Netmeyer et al.?s (1996) instrument, five items related to work-family conflict and five items related to family work conflict. Maslach Burnout Inventory has been used for measuring the emotional exhaustion. The findings showed that employees experience moderate to high levels of work-family conflict, family work conflict and emotional exhaustion in the hospitality industry. Findings also revealed that work family conflict and family work conflict is highly significantly positively related to emotional exhaustion and are main determinant of emotional exhaustion. It is concluded that this may be because of extensive, irregular or inflexible working hours work-overload and other forms of job stress, interpersonal conflicts, unsupportive managers or the organization and commitments and experiences in family which interfere with work-life, such as the presence of young children, elder care responsibilities, inter personal conflict within the family unit, or unsupportive family members.