Individual , Organizational and Environmental Factors Affecting Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is very important among employee and employers in organizations. Imbalance in work-life will create a lot problem in terms of life satisfaction and workplace satisfaction. This paper is to discuss a study regarding the influence of emotional, spiritual intelligence, organizational support job engagement and technology advancement on employees work-life balance. The findings showed that emotional intelligence, job engagement and organizational support were found positively and significantly related to work-life balance. Furthermore, both technology advancement and work overload were found negatively and significantly related to work-life balance. However the findings indicated that spiritual intelligence was not significantly related to work-life balance.


Introduction
Employee work-life balance is not something that can be taken lightly.The absence of work-life balance has been linked to many negative consequences that could be detrimental to employee performance (Hobson, Delunas, & Kesic, 2001).Nonetheless, it seemed that the numbers of working people who were reported to experience work-life balance, worldwide, is getting smaller by the years.This is evident when a survey conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (2009), on 50,000 global workers, showed that in 2009 only 30 percent of the global workers reported to have a good work-life balance, as compared to 53 percent in 2006.In fact, the statistics of Australian Bureau reported that, between the year 1979 and 2009, the numbers of employees who worked 50 hours or more per week have increased from 14 to 15 per cent (Pike, 2012), and increased work hours indeed has become a major contribution to work-life imbalance.Therefore, without doubt employee work-life balance has been deteriorating and it is affecting their life as a whole.
Work-life imbalance has been found to have various negative consequences.One of them is that, it has been found to affect the employees family relationship (Pike, 2012); to the extent that it could cause work-family conflict (Alam, Biswas, & Hassan, 2009;Doble & Supriya, 2010).When the employees' family relationship is affected, it could affect their concentration at work and consequently affect their performance.Besides that, Major, Klein, and Ehrhart (2002) found that longer working hours (i.e.work-life imbalance) was significantly linked to depression and stress related problems.This finding is supported by the study of Kinman and Jones (2003), which showed that long working hours has an effect on employees' psychological (i.e.anxiety and depression) and physical wellbeing (i.e.coronary heart disease), and both these factors are linked with job stress in many occupations.In short, work-life balance is very important for all working individuals and imbalance could negatively affect their well-being and this could not be good for their performance.
Currently, there are quite a large number of studies that have been done looking into the issue of work-life balance.Some of these studies examines factors that lead to the uptake of work-life programmes implemented by organizations (McCarthy, Cleveland, Hunter, Darcy, & Grady, 2013), while others studied the factors affecting work-life balance (e.g.Lester, 1999;Syrek, Apostel, & Antoni, 2013).Most importantly, all these studies focused on factors that could improve the work-life balance of today's workforce, and all of them agreed that there are many factors that could influence it, and further research needs to be conducted discover other factors that could contribute to work-life balance.Hence, it is the objective of this study to fill this gap, and determine the relationship between several individual factors and organizational factors to work-life balance.Specifically, the current study focuses on the influence that spiritual, emotional intelligence, job engagement, workload, technological advancement, and organizational support, has on work-life balance.The findings of this research would contribute to existing literature on work-life balance because it helps in understanding the role played by individual factors (i.e.individual's spiritual, emotional intelligence and job engagement), organizational factors (i.e.organizational support and workload), as well as environmental factor (i.e.technological advancement) in enhancing the workforce work-life balance.

The Balance Theory and Work-Life Balance
In general, the balance theory, a theory originated from the work of Fritz Heider (1946), posits that if people see a set of cognitive elements as being a system, then they will have a preference to maintain a balanced state among these elements.From the perspective of most employees, they would see that their paid work and all important aspects of their life, such as family, community activities, voluntary work, personal development, leisure and recreation, as a set of cognitive elements that must be in the state of balanced, and thus need to managed effectively (Dundas, 2008).In other words, there is a need for these employees to maintain work-life balance, otherwise both their performance at work and everywhere else will be jeopardize.However, maintaining work-life balance is not easy, especially if the individuals (i.e.employees) do not have the capacity to do it effectively and the organizations that they work for do nothing to help them.Hence, there is a need to determine factors that could help employees maintain their work-life balance.
Previous studies have shown that here are many factors that could affect work-life balance.Some of the factors that have been shown to have a positive relationship with work-life balance.These factors include job satisfaction (Saif, Malik, & Awan, 2010); and telework (Felstead, Jewson, Phizaklea, & Walters, 2002;Morganson, Major, Oborn, Verine, & Heelan, 2010;Hilbrecht, Shaw, Johnson, & Andrey, 2008).On the other hand, some factors were found to have a negative impact on work-life balance, for example work overload (Virick, Lilly, & Casper, 2007), and job demands (Chiang, Birtch, & Kwan, 2010).Indeed there are many factors that have been said to affect work-life balance, but there are still many more that need to be discovered.

Emotional Intelligence and Work-Life Balance
One factor that has been discussed to have an effect on work-life balance is an individual's emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2001).According to Thorndike (1920), having emotional intelligence means the ability to understand and manage people and to act wisely in human relations.In agreement, Mayer and Salovey (1997) indicated that emotional intelligence is "the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thoughts, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth".It is important to have emotional intelligence in balancing one's work-life because it enables one's thinking and actions deal with anything with a measure of balance, maturity and also retain a positive viewpoint almost all the time.However, thus far only a couple of empirical study has been conducted to link emotional intelligence and work-life balance.One study was conducted by JothiSree and Jyothi (2012), and they found that emotional intelligence plays an important role for women employees who are trying to achieve a good work-life balance.Similar findings were also reported by Ramanithilagam and Ramanigopal (2012) in their study which was conducted in India.Therefore, it is important to highlight here that emotional intelligence could be a very important factor in maintaining work-life balance.
In general, employees who possess emotional intelligence would be able to monitor their own emotions, and thus also effectively manage feeling and emotions of others (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).In fact, it has been said that employees who are able to use their emotional intelligence will know how to enjoy working in a team and reduce stress, rediscover themselves, to feel motivated, develop empathy, good communication with their co-workers, arrange time with their family members, can fulfill their family member's needs and also can build a good relationship with their spouse (Gardner & Goleman 1998).By using their emotion, employees will be able to know how they influences other people around them and able to balance their personal and professional lives.In conclusion, what the employees feel and how they express their emotions affects their performance and these abilities helps them solve problems either at work or in family.Therefore, it is hypothesized that: H 1 : There is a significant positive relationship between emotional intelligence and work-life balance

Spiritual Intelligence and Work-Life Balance
Another individual factor that have been said to influence individual's work-life balance is spiritual intelligence (Sum, 2005).Spiritual intelligence is one of the new concepts of intelligence which helps a person solve problems.Spiritual intelligence has many effects on human life, especially at his workplace and at home.Emmons (2000) defined spiritual intelligence as "the adaptive use of spiritual information to facilitate everyday problem solving and goal attainment".According to Emmons (2000), having spiritual intelligence means one has the ability to transcend the physical and material, experience heightened states of consciousness, sanctify everyday experience, and utilize spiritual resources to solve problems.Though it has not been proven that spiritual intelligence has a significant relationship with work-life balance, it is an important factor that affects the quality of life (Maryam, Habibah, Krauss, & Siti Aishah, 2012), which directly affect work-life balance.
In essence, people with higher spiritual intelligence experienced higher states of consciousness, and therefore are more able to use their intellectual resources to solve problems (Nadaf, Daneshvar, & Ljahanbani 2002), and in this case the problem of work-life imbalance can be solved.Spiritual intelligence is important for work-life balance because spiritual intelligence motivates people to balance their work schedules, so that they can spend time with their family (Tekkeveettil, 2005).In addition to that, by using spiritual intelligence, employees will be able to change stress into positive power and also spiritual intelligence also allows them to be present in the moment free of anger, resentment, worry, and fear (Zohar & Marshall, 2000).Hence, it is also argued here that spiritual intelligence has a very important role in making the employees accept their responsibilities and grant them some capabilities for solving problems which will lead to achieving their goal of work-life balance.Based on this argument, it is hypothesized that: H 2 : There is a significant positive relationship between spiritual intelligence and work-life balance.

Job Engagement and Work-Life Balance
Another factor that could affect work-life balance is job engagement.Engagement is the state in which individuals are emotionally and intellectually committed to the organization as measured by three primary behaviors such as say, stay and strive (Jawaharrani & Susi, 2011).Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker, (2002) specifically define job engagement as a positive, fulfilling work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.Indeed, job engagement has a positive impact on work performance because engaged employees are fully involved in day-to-day work and able to perform better in their job, and this premise is supported by previous research which found significant positive relationship between job engagement and employee performance (e.g.Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010).However, the relationship between job engagement and work-life balance could be rather tricky, and thus research that links this two variables are still limited.
This study argued that job engagement could affects employees' work-life balance.There are previous study support that, there is a significant relationship between employee job engagement and work-life balance (Amarakoon & Wickramasinghe, 2010;Jawaharrani & Susi, 2011).In general, these studies argued that work-life balance has a significant influence on job engagement, and not the other way around.It is important to highlight that highly engaged employees are vigorous, dedicated and absorbed employees.It is most likely that highly engaged employees in their work will able to manage a good work-life balance.It is because the people are expected to be dedicated employees who are highly involved in their work and committed to their profession.When this happen, work-life balance could be increase.Hence, it is highly possible that a job engagement could positively affect work-life balance.In relation to that, it is hypothesized that: H 3 : There is a significant positive relationship between job engagement and work-life balance.

Organizational Support and Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is not only the responsibility of the employees, but also of the employers.Organizations also must take care of their employees by helping them maintaining a healthy balance between their personal and professional life.In other words, organizational must provide the needed support for the employees to maintain work-life balance.Organizational support is important because providing support means that firms value the contribution of their employees and cares for their employee's wellbeing (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986).
Organizational support is important in maintaining a good work-life balance.Organizations that did not understand the importance of work-life balance might abuse their employees' hard work and effort.On the other hand, organizations that care about the well-being of their employees would show support by implementing program and policies that emphasize on work-life balance (McCarthy, Cleveland, Hunter, Darcy, & Grady, 2013).McCarthy et al. (2013) found that such effort have a positive impact on employees work-live balance.Besides that, other literatures have also shown that organizational support has an effect on work-life balance, in which it moderates the relationship between various factors and work-life balance (Amarakoon & Wickramasinghe, 2010;Nasurdin & Driscoll, 2012).In short, organizational support was found to play an important role in the regulation and management of work-life balance.In fact, organizational support in the form of work-life balance programmes (i.e.flexible work arrangements and also family leave policies) or initiatives could help employees manage a good balance with their work life and personal life.Therefore, organizational support is important factor which will facilitates work-life balance, and therefore it is hypothesized that: H 4 : There is a significant positive relationship between organizational support and work-life balance.

Work Overload and Work-Life Balance
Specifically work overload is one of the major factor that was said to influence work-life balance.Work overload describes a perception that one has too much to do (Leiter & Schaufeli, 1996).Individual who perceive their workload to be more than they can handle are likely to experience exhaustion and fatigue, which may negatively influence one's motivation to respond to the demands of other domains (i.e.friends and family) (Aryee, Srinivas & Tan, 2005).Furthermore, experience shows that when employees are overworked they actually do not produce extra output.In fact, when employees were overloaded with work, they often get frustrated that their work-life balance seems to be nonexistent (Vogel, 2012).Therefore, it is expected that work overload would be negatively and strongly related to work-life balance, and it is hypothesized that: H 5 : There is a significant negative relationship between excessive work overload and work-life balance.

Technology Advancement and Work-Life Balance
One of the main reasons for this increasing concern of work-life balance is due to technology advancement which has impact on work and personal lives.Advance technology is good for the workplace because it enables a more flexible approach to when and where to work (Lester, 1999).However, it is also argued that technology can help and hinder work-life balance by making work more accessible at all times of the day and night (Lester, 1999).In support of that, Stephens, McGowan, Stoner, and Robin (2007) also highlighted that connectivity technology is making some lives less flexible and making it harder to maintain work-life balance.This argument is supported by the finding of Stawarz, Cox, Bird, and Benedyk (2013), who found that tablets have negative impacts on work-life balance, and Waller and Ragsdell (2012) who found that e-mail has a negative impact on employees' lives outside of working hours.In short, technological advancement provides flexibility with respect to the timing and location of work, and makes it easier to accommodate both work and family, but it has a negative impact on work-life balance.Therefore, technologies have done more to damage work-life balance than to help it, and this is not so good for the employees.
H 5 : There is a significant negative relationship between advance technology and work-life balance.

Respondents of the Study
The population for this study is police officers because in Malaysia a 2011 survey conducted by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Medical Center reported that 53.7% of police officers surveyed experienced a high level of stress, which is a sign of work-life imbalance.This research was conducted in 12 police headquarters in Peninsular Malaysia that has a total population of 11,388.This is because they handle more critical cases and workload compared to other stations.A stratified sampling method was applied and a total of 1900 questionnaires were distributed through a representative appointed at each location.The distribution and collection of the survey instruments took about four months.
Of the 1900 questionnaires distributed, only 1566 questionnaires were found to be useful for further analysis, which indicates a response rate of 82.42%.The respondents of this study consisted of 66.90 percent male and 33.10 percent female, whereby a majority of them were between 26 to 30 years old.A total of 77.5 percent were married, with a majority of them have 3 to 5 children.With regard to educational level, only 12.3 percent has a bachelor degree and above, and with regard to ranks the majority of the respondents (46.7%) are corporal and lance corporal.Finally 60.6 percent of the officers have at least ten years of experience.

Measurements
All measures use seven-point Likert scale, whereby 1 represents 'strongly disagree', 2 represents 'moderately disagree', 3 represents 'slightly disagree', 4 represents 'neither agree or disagree', 5 represents 'slightly agree', 6 represents 'moderately agree', and 7 represents 'strongly agree'.Emotional intelligence were measured using a 16-item scale adapted from the Wong and Low Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLIES) by Wong and Low (2002), while spiritual intelligence were measure using the 24 item Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory (SISRI) by King and DeCicco (2009).Job engagement is measured using a 17 items Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) instrument which is adapted from Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002), work overload was measured by six items adopted from Qureshi, Ahmed Jamil, Iftikhar, Arif, Lodhi, Naseem and Zaman (2012), technology was measured using a 4 item scale by Waller and Ragsdell (2012), and perceived organizational support was measured using the 8 items from Eisenberger, Cummings, Armeli, and Lynch, (1997).Finally, work-life balance was measured using a 15 item scale adapted from Hayman (2005).

Measurement Model
This study employed SPSS 20.0 for all descriptive analysis and partial least squares (PLS) path modeling (Wold, 1974(Wold, , 1985) ) using Smart PLS 2.0 software (Ringle, Wende, & Will, 2005) to test the hypothesis.The research model for this study is presented in Figure 1.According to Goetz and Liehr-Gobbers, (2004) ;Hulland, (1999) there are three step procedures for evaluating the measurement model namely, individual item reliabilities, convergent validity and discriminant validity.Individual item reliabilities is determined based on item loading, and it is recommended that all items have loadings between 0.4 and 0.7, and that items with loadings below 0.4 be dropped from the analysis (Hair et al., 2014;Hulland, 1999;Caimines & Zeller, 1979).As shown in Table 1, all item loads a range from 0.70 to 0.897 into their respective construct.
Next, the convergent validity of each construct was assessed.Convergent validity refers to the extent to which item truly represents the intended latent construct and indeed correlate with other measures of the same latent construct (Hair et al., 2006).According to Fornell and larcker, (1981), convergent validity was assessed by examining the average variance extracted (AVE) and composite reliability (CR) of 0.70.Chin (1998) recommends that AVE of more than 0.5 and the CR of 0.7 or above are deemed acceptable.As can be seen from Table 1.1, all loadings and AVE are above 0.5 and the composite reliability values are more than 0.7.Therefore, it can be concluded that convergent validity has been established.Next, the discriminant validity which is the extent to which a construct is truly distinct from other constructs (Duarte & Raposo, 2010) was assessed.This can be established by the low correlations between all the measure of the interest and the measure of other construct.To address discriminant validity, the square root of the AVE is compared against the correlations of the other constructs, when the AVE extracted is greater than its correlations with all the other constructs the discriminant validity has been established (Fornell & Larcker, 1981), and this is shown in Table 2

Structural Model
The structural model represents the relationship between constructs or latent variables that were hypothesized in the research model.The goodness of the theoretical model is established by the variance explained (R2) of the endogenous constructs and the significance of all path estimates (Chin, 2010).Together the R2 and path coefficients indicate how well the data support the hypothesized model (Chin, 1998).The results of the structural model from the PLS output are shown in Figure 2 and Table 3.

Discussion and Conclusion
The main purpose of this study is to determine the influence of several individual (i.e.emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and job engagement), organizational factors (i.e.organizational support and work overload) and environmental factor (i.e.advance technology) on employees work-life balance.As discussed in the literature review section, all these variables have previously been linked to work-life balance either empirically and/or theoretically.In general, the findings of this study supports previous findings, except the finding regarding to spiritual intelligence.The findings relating to spiritual intelligence is not as hypothesized, it shows that there is no relationship between spiritual intelligence and work-life balance.Hence, let's examine this finding first.
In essence, the findings implied that spiritual intelligence is not necessary for work-life balance.It was hypothesized that with spiritual intelligence, employees should be able to experience more work-life balance.This is because their spiritual intelligence enables them solving everyday problem, in this case work related problem, more efficiently (Emmons, 2000), and therefore, they have more time for their social life.However, the current findings showed that spiritual intelligence is not a factor that could influence work-life balance.Specifically, with the current sample, i.e. police officers, spiritual intelligence is not needed in order to experience work-life balance.One possible explanation for this situation is that the age of the respondent in this study.The majority respondent in this study is young police officers and the level of spiritual intelligence among them is still rather low.As a result, they are unable to access the deepest meaning, purpose and highest motivation.Young police officers are still in developing their spiritual intelligence, and hence, they need longer time to finding quiet places for reflection or by practicing meditation or prayer.It is a possibility that increase age among the police officers will slowly increase their spiritual intelligence, and this could result in better work-life balance.This study concluded that, young age of police officers are who are having low spiritual intelligence that lead to decrease in work-life balance among them.
The findings of the study also revealed that job engagement and work-life balance were positively related.It seemed that the findings of this study confirm the findings of previous research (Amarakoon, & Wickramasinghe, 2010;Jawaharrani & Susi, 2011).In other words, job engagement is important for work-life balance.Indeed, when people are highly engaged with their job they are able to do their job better and thus is able to experience higher work-life balance.This implies that organizations must ensure that employees are engaged in their job, so that they become efficient at performing them, and thus they can achieve work-life balance.
Nonetheless, emotional intelligence is important for employees to acquire work-life balance.This finding confirms the findings of research that was mainly conducted in India (JothiSree & Jyothi, 2012;Ramanithilagam & Ramanigopal, 2012).Having emotional intelligence means one is able to understand his/her own emotions and the emotions of others around them.When working, we are always in contact with other employees, our co-workers, subordinates or superiors, and any form of interaction requires us to have emotional intelligence so that we are able to communicate better.With emotional intelligence we will be able to understand our own need and relate to those whom we work with better, and as a consequence we will be able to complete our work more effectively and thus maintain our work-life balance.
Another factor that was found to have a positive effect on work-life balance is organizational support.
Organization that is supportive of its employees means that the organization firms value the contribution of their employees and cares for their employee's wellbeing (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986).Supportive organizations understand the needs of its employees, inside and outside the organization, and therefore providing the support that they need to succeed on the job and in life.
Two factors that are not good for work-life balance are work overload and technological advancement.With regard to workload, studies have repeatedly emphasized that excessive work overload or work overload is detrimental to work-life balance (Vogel, 2012).This is also true where technological advancement (Lester, 1999;Stephens et al., 2007).Technology, is properly used could be beneficial to the employees and enables them to manage their work-life balance.However, if the use of technology disrupts employees life outside their work, that is when technology becomes bad for employees work-life balance.Hence, advancement in technology cannot be taken for granted and cannot be used excessively as it could be bad for work-life balance.
In conclusion, emotional intelligence, job engagement and organizational support are good for enhancing employees work-life balance, which implies that organizations must do something to enhance these three factors.
In addition, further investigation is also needed on the relationship between spiritual intelligence and work-life balance.Nonetheless, this study supports the fact that workload and technology advancement is important in the workplace, but excessive workload and uncontrolled use of technology can be detrimental to employees work-life balance.This means organizations must monitor these two factors so that it could benefit their organizations and not do any harm to the work-life balance of its employees.

Figure
Figure 1.Research model

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The structural model

Table 1 .
. Result of the measurement model

Table 3 .
Summary of the structural model