Free Paper Sample: Work-Family Conflict Impact on Job Satisfaction of Correctional Officers

Purpose and Prior Findings

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The purpose of the study under review was to examine the impact that work-on-family conflict has the job satisfaction of correctional officers and thus expanding the existing research literature. The researchers' quest to study this question was motivated by the literature gap existing in relation to correctional staff job stress. According to the researchers, a lot of information had been published on the research topic but has primarily focused on aspects such as stress causes, responses to stress, mechanisms for coping with stress as well as the consequences of stress. However, in the researchers' view, a gap still existed in relation to addressing the effect that work-to-family conflict has on correctional employee job satisfaction.

Hypothesis

Based on a review of the existing literature, the researchers submitted three primary hypotheses as follows:

Work-family conflict has an impact, with statistical significance, on correctional employee job satisfaction.

Family-work conflict will have an inverse relationship, which is statistically significant, with correctional employee job satisfaction.

Work-family conflict has a larger influence on job satisfaction levels of correctional staff compared to family-work conflict.

Method

The data type used by researchers was that of responses from the prison employees which were made to the administered survey. The surveys used for this research were of the questionnaire type whereby the respondents were administered with a survey questionnaire which was then collected and analyzed after completion while maintaining confidentiality. The sample size used in the research comprised 270 respondents drawn from the available 400 employees at the time of the survey. The analytic strategy adopted by the researchers is the questioning analytic strategy which involves the asking of appropriate questions-ones that contribute to the discovery of new knowledge in a given research topic. Questioning as an analytic strategy was valuable throughout the research as it helped in the discovery of the existing literature gaps as well as in the data extraction stage of the research. By asking themselves exploratory questions, the researchers were able to identify the area that has received the least attention while the questionnaires used to collect data from respondents were question-based.

Results

The main findings of the research can be summarized as follows:

A work-on-family conflict negatively correlates, significantly, with job satisfaction while family-on-work conflict lacks statistical significance.

The variables tenure, sex, job dangerousness, being an officer and role ambiguity show a negative correlation that is statistically significant with job satisfaction.

Demographic variables such as education, race, and age lack any significant correlations with satisfaction to a job.

Evidently, the results were consistent with the hypotheses. As predicted earlier, a work-family conflict would have an impact that has statistical significance on correctional employee job satisfaction. Also, It was hypothesized that work-family conflict would have a larger effect on correctional officers' job satisfaction than family-work conflict. These are in agreement with the obtained results.

Discussion/Conclusion

The overall conclusion was that work-family conflict is a weighty issue that significantly affects the lives and job satisfaction levels of correctional employees and hence should be treated by as an issue of immediate concern. A key flaw discussed in this research work is the use of limited measures of work-family conflict hence recommending the development of better and more specific measures for future research. In terms of the significance of the findings, the researchers have shown that indeed, work-on-family conflict negatively correlates with the job satisfaction levels of correctional officers which gives new insights into the under-researched area while reinforcing the existing literature.

Critical Review

The reviewed article is related to the book "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing" through a number of ways. One of these ways is the fact that the two express the personal challenges that correctional officers undergo. Throughout the book, the author uncovers the harsh realities experienced by both inmates and correctional officers. For instance, the author states, "...after working near one congenial seeming inmate for a long time, he became so comfortable talking to him that he'd confided to the inmate about some problems at home and shortness of money" (pg. 63) Similarly, the article explains how confrontations at work could result in a family conflict when the officer involved "takes out" anger and tension to their family (pg. 2). In the two statements, the authors emphasize the stress of work and home that correctional officers face, which sometimes goes out of their control.