Dr. Kevin Wynne, Associate Professor of Management

Do you have academic responsibilities? If you’re a student, of course you do! But you may also have responsibilities as a parent or family member, as an employee, as a volunteer, or as a community member. If you’re a manager, the stakes and demands are even higher. Sometimes these different roles and responsibilities may clash or conflict. That is, sometimes our different roles in life may interfere with one another—spending more time on one thing leaves less time for another.

We’d like to think that all of the students at The University of Baltimore spend each semester managing their responsibilities to logistical perfection, but the truth is that like anyone who strives to find balance, our students face some frustration in balancing these competing demands on our time.

For example, they face their professors’ requirements, their employer’s demands, and various commitments with their family and friends. They do the dance that millions of people do each and every day when they are trying to manage the tasks of work and life.

Being middle-aged brings some unique challenges. With an average age of 30 for our undergraduates (34 years of age for our graduate students and 28 years of age for our law students), one could only imagine what their current stage of life requires of them. And then if you consider that women represent 62% of our student body, you’ll really appreciate the work that one of our management professors has recently published.

In a recent article titled “The intersectional effect of age and gender on the work-life balance of managers”, co-authored and published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology by Kevin Wynne, Assistant Professor of Management at the Merrick School of Business, he and his team take a close examination of the intersection of age and gender on the work-family interface of 421 managers. They looked at how age and gender may both be crucially important factors in explaining when we may have more or less balance in our lives.

There is a great deal of research on gender, age, and work-life balance as separate topics, but there is much less when it comes to studying gender and age in tandem together. The authors use a social role theory framework to investigate the intersectional effects of age and gender roles on the work-life balance of managers. These relationships are likely complex and not straightforward. Thus, this study is the first true test of the non-linear interactions that describe the complex relationship between age, gender, and work-life balance, using a gender-balanced diverse sample of working managers.

“If you think about the milestones that occur in our lives after we begin our careers—like marriage, children, promotions—you begin to see the different roles that managers play in their work and personal lives,” said Wynne. “We see it interacting with each other in complex ways like when a manager’s work demands conflict with their family responsibilities. This can make it difficult for managers to achieve work-life balance.”

There were some interesting and informative results from the study. First, there is a “U” shaped pattern that pinpoints at the trough the heaviest load where someone’s professional and personal life converge the most. In other words, the middle stage of life usually involves some common themes, such as starting a family. The middle stage of life also usually corresponds with—and clashes with—the midpoint of one’s career, undermining work-life balance for people in this middle life stage, compared to when we’re younger (early career) and older (later career). Interestingly, ifyou look even closer by gender, the study reveals women are impacted very differently than men. This research shows that women do not necessarily enjoy the “benefits” that men do—for men, work-life balance rebounds later in life (later in the career), whereas, for women, work-life balance continues to stay at a lower level. The research paper talks about possible explanations for this.

No matter where you are in your career journey, the topic of work-life balance will arise sooner or later. As you build your career and make life’s personal choices, it is inevitable that you will be pushed and pulled by the expectations of each arena and occasionally be at the intersection of both. Your ability to persevere is important – and we’ll say that is one thing a UBalt student does best.

The Merrick School of Business is proud to celebrate Dr. Wynne’s research article that won the 2023 Emerald Literati Awards for Outstanding Paper. For 30 years the Emerald Literati Awards have celebrated and rewarded the outstanding contributions of authors and reviewers, not only to their journals and books but to the body of knowledge itself.