To cite this Article Peters, Pascale , den Dulk, Laura and van der Lippe, Tanja(2009) 'The effects of time-spatial flexibility and new working conditions on employees' work-life balance: the Dutch case', Community, Work & Family, 12: 3, 279-297 To link to this Article:

Helping behavior at work has become increasingly important, with organizations making more and more use of cooperative work practices. The difficulty is that employees are facing growing demands beyond the workplace. This study investigates the mechanisms by which family involvement (family structure, family tasks, family support) affects helping behavior in teams. Based on a sample of 495 team members, the results show that having a supportive partner and performing care tasks increase helping behavior via enhanced fulfillment and skills. Having young children is directly and negatively related to helping behavior. The authors also conducted separate analyses for men and women.

Many organizations in Europe offer work-life policies to enable men and women to combine work with family life. The authors argue that the availability of organizational work-life policies can also reduce gender inequality in wages. The authors test their expectations using the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, with data from 259 organizations and their employees in 9 European countries. Multilevel analyses show that organizations that offer work-life policies have a smaller gender wage gap. Their findings also suggest that both the type and number of policies matter. Contrary to their expectations, dependent care policies, such as parental leave and childcare support, are less important for the gender wage gap than flexibility policies. Controlling for organizational culture regarding family supportiveness does not alter the results.

Using large-scale data on immigrants in the Netherlands, the authors tested competing arguments about the role of origin- and host-country human capital and bonding and bridging social capital in immigrants' self-employment. When taking job-skill level into account, immigrants with a higher level of origin- and destination-country education are less likely to be self-employed than salary employed. Likewise, the likelihood of self-employment decreases with origin-country work experience but not with host-country work experience. The presumed positive effect of bonding social capital is not found, but this study's results suggest that immigrants with an access to bridging social capital are more likely to be self-employed than those without such contacts.

This article investigates the association between work characteristics and parent–child interaction time. In addition to studying the commonly considered working hours, the authors investigated the effects of job demands and resources such as job insecurity, autonomy and non-standard hours. Moreover, they analysed whether these associations were different for fathers than for mothers and for parents with young vs adolescent children. The authors analysed self-collected data on 2593 Dutch parents and found that parents participated more in parent–child activities when they worked shorter hours, experienced more autonomy, could be reached by their children at work and worked during non-standard hours. Nevertheless, the work characteristics had little explanatory value additional to the working hours. The association between working hours and parent–child time was weaker for mothers and for parents with young children. Moreover, the beneficial effect of non-standard hours was stronger for mothers and autonomy more relevant for parents with adolescent children.