Job characteristics as an antecedent of work-life balance and psychological well-being among academic staff in malaysian research universities

Abstract

Both research and technological revolutions have significantly changed university's job characteristics and direction today. These have threatened academics psychological well-being and work-life balance due to increased workload and stressful working conditions. However, the existing literature offers limited studies on this phenomenon involving academics in research universities. Therefore, this study examines the influence of job characteristics namely skill variety, job autonomy, task identity, task significance and feedback towards worklife balance which comprises work-to-family conflict and work-to-family enrichment and also towards psychological well-being which consists of job satisfaction, psychological health and turnover intention among Malaysian research university academics. The study also tests the mediating effect of work-life balance in the relationship between job characteristics and psychological well-being. Besides, it also investigates the moderating role of self-efficacy in the relationship between job characteristics and work-life balance. This study utilised a quantitative approach, where a set of questionnaires were used as the data collection tool. The respondents were academics from five research universities in Malaysia. A total of 307 questionnaires were usable with a response rate of 92.7%. Structural equation modelling (SEM), using AMOS 23 and SPSS 23, was used to analyse the data. Result indicated that all job characteristics except for task significance have significant influence on the academic?s psychological well-being, whereas all the five job characteristics were found to have significant influence on the academic?s work-life balance. It was also discovered that only three dimension of work-life balance namely work-to-family conflict behavioural-based, work-to-family enrichment capital, work-to-family enrichment development have influence on the academic's psychological well-being. For mediation results, overall work-life balance dimensions found to mediate a total of forty-two paths in this study. In particular, the work-to-family conflict dimensions mediated a total of twenty-two paths, while work-to-family enrichment dimensions mediated the remaining twenty paths in this study. This study failed to support the moderating role of self-efficacy. Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing body of literature by extending the empirical evidences of job characteristics influence on work-life balance and psychological well-being issues among research university academics. Practically, the findings of this study present a guideline to higher education institutions for the purpose of designing good work characteristics to enhance their academics worklife balance and psychological well-being. At the end, this study recommends future researcher to extend the existing model by integrating other relevant variables and also to utilise more advanced research methodology such as mixed method or longitudinal study.