Usable Flexibility, Employees' Concerns about Elders, Gender, and Job Withdrawal

Abstract

Many employees, while at work, have elder-caregiving responsibilities and corresponding concerns about the elders' safety, care, and welfare. These concerns likely escalate when work environments have inflexible schedules or penalize employees for using flexible scheduling options. Caregiving concerns often lead to job withdrawal (i.e., planned job changes), which often has negative economic effects on employees and their families. Using a new measure of caregiving concerns, we estimate a mediational pathway between usable flexibility at work, elder caregiving concerns, and planned job changes in a sample of 572 employed caregivers (25.2% men, 74.8% women). Caregiving concerns mediated the relationship between usable flexibility and planned job changes. Neither gender, nor the joint effect of gender and usable flexibility, moderated relationships linking caregiving concerns to planned changes.

Data for this analysis were gathered under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2005-10-12) to the first author.