Future Work and Family Selves: What Impact on Work-Life Balance?

Identity scholars suggest that the individual’s future self, defined as the mental representation of oneself in the future and including hopes and aspirations that an individual develops in relation to a meaningful role of his or her life (Strauss et al., 2012), is an important motivational mechanism driving individual attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on this evidence, in the current research we develop the concept of Future Family Self (FFS) with the intention to verify how the mental representation of the type of family person an individual wish to become in his or her family in the future, influences work-family decision-making and work-life balance. Using a sample of international business school students, we firstly analyze what type of FFS business school students are likely to develop at the beginning of their career. Secondly, with a two-wave research design with 6 months lag between the first and second survey (moment in which our respondents had started to work), we examine whether the salience of an individual’s FFS is likely to influence individual work-family outcomes. We expect that the greater will be the salience of an individual’s FFS, the more likely the individual will frame important decisions of his or her life as impacting both the work and the family self, with positive repercussion on work-life balance. We also consider whether the individuals’ perceptions of family supportiveness of their supervisor (i.e. FSSB) moderates the relationship between FFS and work-family decision-making and between work-family decision-making and work-life balance.