Work and family: Do multi-tasking and social networks help or hurt?

Multitasking is becoming quite distinctive of modern organizations. The increased use of work teams and job rotation, the need for continuous learning and development of complementary skills, the direct participation of employees in decision making on multiple issues seem to drive organizations towards more ‘polychronic’ scenarios (Lindbeck and Snower, 2000; Milgrom and Roberts,1990). Individuals who are high in polychronicity tend to do better in these environments than individuals who do not naturally engage in multi-tasking. While employees struggle to do many things at once in the workplace, at the same time, they have demands from their families as well. This struggle may be eased by the capacity of individuals and organizations to build positive interactions in the workplace. In this paper we explore the interplay between the preference of individuals to do many things at once (polychronicity); their centrality in the workplace social networks and the level of support they are able to gain from such networks; and their ability to enrich their family domain from the experiences gained in the work domain (work family enrichment). The paper is structured as follows: we introduce the literature on polychronicity and work family enrichment and propose hypotheses on their relationships; we describe our data collection in a University department and the methodology that we followed; finally we illustrate and discuss some preliminary results.