Conservatism Beyond the Right : Exploring the Relationship between Conservatism and Work-Life Conflict.

Abstract: The issue of work-life balance and work-life conflict has become increasingly important as the relationship between employer and employee becomes more flexible. This situation has blurred the line between what was once clearly the place of work and the place of life. Various studies have found evidence linking poor work-life balance to increased rates of adverse health outcomes, increasing the need for organisational cultures, policies, and interventions to better address the phenomenon’s underlying antecedents, mediators, and aggravators. However, knowledge of these mechanisms has often remained limited, and many have called for greater expansion of the individual characteristics that get accounted for in research and intervention design. Using a mixed-methods approach in a Swedish context, it was explored whether conservatism (social + economic) was one of these characteristics, testing for a significant relationship with work-life conflict. The quantitative findings (linear regression) showed a significant and positive relationship between social conservatism and work-life conflict. In contrast, economic conservatism had a significant and negative relationship with work-life conflict. These relationships held while controlling for demographics (age, sex, living status), psycho-social characteristics (class identity, emotional stability, work-life satisfaction), and occupational characteristics (working hours, education, job demands and control). The qualitative aspect explored different causes and strategies of work-life conflict across low, medium, and high self-rated conservatives, using content analysis to find any latent differences. The qualitative findings suggest that individuals higher in conservatism prefer strategies to cope with work-life conflict that focus more on order and stability compared to those lower. The overall findings have implications for research and policy that address work-life balance issues. It also suggests there is room to expand our traditional conceptualisation of conservatism as a general tendency beyond any political system of thought.