Work Life Balance in the Automotive Industry in Ireland : What are the drivers that impact on the employee and employer achieving a good work life balance/ work family balance?

The challenge to sustain a balance between work life and personal life has grown over recent years significantly in society. For the employees, they face ever increasing time pressure, bigger workloads and mounting barriers to fulfilling both personal and job demands. In an employee’s role the demand for efficiency leads to more responsibilities, and these have to be completed in a shorter period of time. High customer satisfaction and demands means that employees have to work increasing number of business hours, the results are longer terms of absence from their families. This study will show that there are unpredictable demands of work life balance (WLB) in the automotive industry, and this is the biggest challenges for employees in the modern society. Research reveals that there are a growing percentage of employees who are overstrained from merging the work domain with the family domain, resulting in an increasing number of sick days which are due to psychological diseases (Frone et al., (1992). This absenteeism because of psychological illness is often prolonged and sustains sizeable costs for the employer. Employer’s motivation will be to consider the balance between work and family life of their employees in order to reduce this cost. Over the years, various research has been carried out to enable a better understanding of the effects of the imbalance between work and family domains and the possible outcomes as discussed by (Anderson et al., 2002; Higgins et al., 2000). What is more, the influencing factors and drivers that make up successful WLB for employees has seen far less research to verify the situation