Dutch workers and time pressure: household and workplace characteristics

Balancing work with family life has become one of the most important issues for families nowadays. In this article I study the varying degrees of success of governance structures in households and firms in dealing with competing time claims. Using Dutch data from firms, employees and their spouses and performing regression analyses with robust estimation to test the hypotheses, the results show that more modern organizations characterized by heavy deadlines and a large amount of autonomy for individual employees give more feelings of time pressure. With respect to the organization of the household, especially the presence of young children, time spent on domestic and paid work and existing household rules explain feelings of time pressure. Gender also appears to be important. Men are influenced more by workplace characteristics, and women more by household characteristics