A Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence Analysis Exploring How LGBTQ and Single Employees Manage Traditional Family Expectations in the Workplace

Abstract

As policies such as the Family and Medical Leave Act expand what it means to be a family, human resource managers are increasingly tasked with navigating work/family balance with employees whose families lie outside of normative expectations. This qualitative research study used Dougherty et al.'s Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence Theory to explore how working adults belonging to nontraditional families work in environments where family is assumed to consist of a spouse and children. Sixty active interviews yielded two phenomenological themes. The first theme explored the ways in which the compulsory traditional family “othered” people from alternative families. As a result of the othering, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)¹, single, and childfree workers experienced simultaneous and paradoxical invisibility and hypervisibility. The second theme revealed ways in which the compulsory traditional family was privileged, causing participants with alternative families to work around traditional family assumptions. For practitioners to successfully manage multiple family formations, it is recommended that the human resource personnel complicate the meaning of family, recognize that families are not fixed but are instead in process, expand training so that there is a better connection between policy and practice, and create compensation and leave packages that address the disparity caused by current work/family policies.

Keywords:

• Work/Family Balance
• Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence
• Othering
• Threshold of Acceptance
• LGBTQ

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions and crucial insight as well as Drs. Rebecca Meisenbach, Michael Kramer and Wayne Brekhus for their unrelenting assistance with the dissertation from which this manuscript emerged. Jenny would also like to thank Henry Blanke and Tammy Wofsey for their tireless work procuring library resources.

Notes

[1] Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer.

[2] From an LC/MD perspective, many of the terms used in this paper could have multiple meanings, some of which are socially problematic. For example, words such as “balance,” “alternative,” “straight,” and “Hispanic” are present in this paper and may be read differently by different readers. Often these terms are used because they emerged during the interviews while at other times the terms were used because there is no other more socially acceptable word that also describes the phenomenon.