Name: Rebecca Storey 

Master’s Thesis Defense Meeting

Date: Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Time: 10:00 AM

Location: Zoom click here 

Advisor:

Kimberly A. French, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

 
Thesis Committee Members: 

Kimberly A. French, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Keaton Fletcher, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech) 

Tammy Allen, Ph.D. (University of South Florida) 

Title: Faculty Time Allocation I-deals and Work-Family Balance

Abstract: 

Poor work-family is balance is one reason that faculty exit their careers in academia. A possible remedy to this issue can be found in the work design literature. Faculty can take active roles in shaping their employment arrangements to meet their needs by negotiating time allocation idiosyncratic deals (i-deals). A time allocation i-deal is an arrangement in which a faculty member negotiates, with their chair, greater flexibility in how they allocate their time across research, teaching, and service responsibilities. Using three waves of archival data collected from faculty in the United States, the present study used needs-supplies (N-S) fit theory to explore whether poor work-family balance prompts faculty to negotiate a time allocation i-deal, and if greater work-family balance is an outcome of these arrangements. Two individual differences, family centrality and decision authority, were also tested as moderators in the relationship between work-family balance and subsequent i-deal use. Altogether, the within-person hypothesized relationships were not significant. However, at the between-person level, time allocation i-deals were positively associated with work-family balance. These findings suggest that faculty who have greater time allocation customization enjoy greater work-family balance, but work-family balance is not maintained over time by continually altering levels of time allocation customization via i-deals.