Balancing work and family in South Korea's public organizations: Focusing on family-friendly policies in elementary school organizations

Family-friendly policies have emerged as a new issue in human resource management. Previous studies mainly focused on the effect of family-friendly policies on organizational productivity or job satisfaction at the organizational level. Little attention has been paid to examining the effect of family-friendly policies at the individual level. Our research fills this gap by examining the effect of family-friendly policies at the individual level with a sample of 127 teachers in four elementary schools in South Korea. We empirically examine the influence of family-friendly policies on job motivation, work performance, and employee morale using a survey method. As a result, we find that a balance between work and family is the strongest predictor influencing job motivation, work performance, and employee morale. Unlike our expectation, however, knowledge and use of familyfriendly policies do not have an impact on these three dependent variables. Considering that such a balance between work and family has a positive influence on the three dependent variables, public organizations need to consider the implementation of available family-friendly policy programs to help balance work and family.