Contact: Ellen Kossek, Labor and Industrial Relations, (517) 353-9040; or Russ White, University Relations, (517) 355-2281, whiterus@msu.edu

12/5/2005

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University will partner with Portland State University to conduct a first-of-its-kind study on how work-family stress affects employee health, well-being and their families as part of a National Institutes of Health work-family research network.

Ellen Ernst Kossek, professor of labor and industrial relations at Michigan State University, and Leslie Hammer, professor of psychology at Portland State University, have received a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to create a center to research supervisor behaviors that support the health and safety of workers and their families.

The goal of the center is to enable employees to effectively manage work and family demands.

“The three-year study is the first in the nation to look more in depth at the relationships between physical and mental health of the workers and their families, and family and work stress,” said Kossek. ”We will design organizational interventions that will give workers more control over scheduling and workload, foster teamwork, and a positive work culture, and lead to improved safety and health of employees and decreased work-family stress.”

Kossek and Hammer will be working together with several grocery store chains as well as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

The center will study how the grocery workers relate work outcomes such as safety, productivity and absenteeism performance to daily stresses faced within the workplace. Kossek and Hammer believe if employers facilitate a friendly work environment with better communication and work-family culture, the nation’s work force will be greatly improved.

The work is the beginning of a national effort designed to help build work-family science in the United States. The joint study is one of several nationwide research collaborations hoping to create a national work-family policy plan to help improve work-family conditions.

Kossek also received a second grant of $400,000 to study flexibility practices in unionized settings, as more employed women and men who are managing family care and working time continues to increase.

The grant, “The Role of Unions in Fostering Flexibility: Changing Dialogue and Negotiating Change,” has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and will continue research for three years. Kossek will work with fellow MSU labor relations professor Peter Berg.

“Very little research has been done on flexible schedules in unionized settings,” Kossek said. “One goal of this study is to increase the knowledge of these work-life flexibility policies in unionized organizations. Sometimes these policies are negotiated in the contracts but workers are unable to use them. Additionally, there may be a lot of informal flexibility occurring in practice that needs to be captured by researchers to show their benefits.”

This study will help assess the effectiveness of work-life flexibility policies from the perspective of workers. It will also measure the effect of work-life flexibility policies and practices on customer satisfaction, absenteeism and productivity.

Research will be conducted by gathering information on workers, their supervisors and union stewards, by visiting nine organizations across three different public and private sector unions that have negotiated a variety of flexibility policies.

Kossek and Berg hope this study will show which benefits of work-life policies work best for unions, workers and management. They then hope to create training modules to help union management devise the best work-life policies for employers and workers.