Contemporary Business Studies - Academy of Knowledge Process ...

International Journal of Contemporary Business StudiesVol: 4, No: 2. February, 2013 ISSN 2156-7506Available online at http://www.akpinsight.webs.comresearchers have also emphasized the spillover caused by the family demands onto the work lives of theemployees. This again is highly relevant in case of dual-career couples. For this group there is a time andenergy deficit where the employee not only strives to meet his/her own work & family demands but alsoof the partner. Even a crossover of emotions between the partners was observed and studied off late(Brummelhuis, Haar & Lippe, 2010). Life satisfaction can create colossal catastrophic consequences forboth, the individual as an employee or the individual as a family member. The catastrophic consequencesfor organizations are generally in the form of job dissatisfaction, reduced job performance and affectivecommitment and high turnover. The catastrophic consequences for a family and its members are spilloverand crossover effects, time and energy deficits.2. RATIONALE AND SCOPE OF THE STUDYThere has been a growing concern about the role of modern day service organizations whose primaryfocus is on customer satisfaction and profit making. This is creating organizational situations in which thework and family roles are getting blurred with the growing responsibilities at work. Against thisbackground, the present study has been conducted to find out the various issues underlying Lifesatisfaction and to present them as a composite whole and in the process identify all the possible futuredirections for research in this area. This paper studies the researches that have been conducted in the areaof Life satisfaction during 1978 to 2011.3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDYThis study has been conducted with the prime objectives of organizing the publications on Lifesatisfaction in an orderly manner so as to enable easy and quick access, classifying literature on Lifesatisfaction and analyzing the outcome of the studies reviewed. The paper also seeks to identify the gapsin the existing literature and suggests the future directions for research in Life satisfaction.4. METHODOLOGYThe paper is based upon studies conducted on Life satisfaction in various countries. A total of 50 papers(all from refereed journals) have been reviewed. The distribution of articles reviewed from varioussources is given in Table 4. All these papers are classified on the basis of various approaches & issuescovered and presented in the Literature review. Life satisfaction literature (for the 50 papers reviewed)majorly deals with Job Satisfaction, Work/Family Demands, Education effects, Gender effects and Timeeffects (Figure 1). Methodological classification of the studies has also been represented in Table 2 &Figure 2. Additionally, cataloging of the studies has been done in Table 3 & Figure 3 for year-wise dataand Table 5 & Figure 4 for country-wise data.5. LITERATURE ON LIFE SATISFACTION5.1 Relationship between Life Satisfaction & Job SatisfactionNear, Rice & Hunt (1978) in their research on what actually comprised of the life satisfaction found thatLife Satisfaction was a multi-component concept with Job Satisfaction, Satisfaction with Home & Healthbeing a part of the overall Life Satisfaction. Later studies conducted by (Chacko I. Thomas, 1983)examined the functional relationship between job satisfaction and general life satisfaction. In a generalsense the results are more supportive of the notion that job satisfaction has a greater influence on life ornon-work satisfaction (spillover model) unlike the compensatory model that suggests contrasts or anegative relation or effect between job and life satisfactions. (Schmitt & Pulakos,1985) in their paperexamined the inter-relationships between job & life satisfaction and indicated that, after controlling fordemographic variables, life satisfaction predicted job satisfaction but in the case of retirees, jobsatisfaction predicted life satisfaction. Another study by (Booth & Ours, 2007) investigated therelationship between part-timework and working hours satisfaction; job satisfaction; and life satisfaction.It was found that men have the highest hours-of-work satisfaction if they work full-time without overtimehours but neither their job satisfaction nor their life satisfaction are affected by how many hours they2013©Academy of Knowledge Process33