Home Relationships and Work Behaviour II. Informal Family Financial Relationships and Productivity at Work
| Published date | 01 April 1981 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055444 |
| Pages | 23-29 |
| Date | 01 April 1981 |
| Author | Thomas Johnston |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Home Relationships and Work
Behaviour II. Informal Family Financial
Relationships and Productivity at Work
Thomas Johnston School of Combined Studies, Bradford College
Introduction
Many studies of work behaviour have been bound by the
factory walls, despite repeated reminders that what hap-
pens outside the organisation can have a direct effect on
behaviour inside it. Some years ago the Rapoports pointed
out that the inter-relationship between work and family
life
"has seldom been studied explicitly... As though family
structure, organisation and functioning depended en-
tirely on factors associated with the family and the in-
dividual personalities within it, while organisation and
functioning of work groups could be explained ex-
clusively in terms of the work situation"[1].
Similarly Shimmin[2] suggested that although there has
been awareness on the part of occupational psychologists
of the external factors which influence job motivation,
these factors have not been the subject of much research.
She states, "We shall have to concern ourselves more
closely than hitherto with events and circumstances outside
the factory and the office." Dalton's work[3] on rate
busters and restrictors, for example, showed how their
behaviour at work could, to a large extent, be explained in
terms of the individuals' family backgrounds.
Within the workplace, money is often regarded as the
most obvious means of affecting work behaviour, but the
relationship between the two is far from simple. Whyte[4]
has suggested that an individual's response to economic
factors will be conditioned by a number of external forces,
including his relations within the family and community,
and Young[5] in his study of the domestic economy states:
"Economists have been no less inclined than doctors to
forget that their subjects have families, and that the at-
titudes of workers to their families, expressed in the
division of money as in many other ways, is a crucial
factor in the workers' attitude to production."
He goes on:
"Workers' desires for higher incomes depend upon
whether there is a small or a large gap between what
they already have and what they would like to have.
Whenever incomes rise faster than aspirations, the
power of monetary incentives will be weakened... If
they retain a large sum for their own pocket money,
they may consider they are earning quite enough to
satisfy their own aspirations."
Part I[6] of this paper explored some of the informal
financial relationships where young working people living
at home contributed to the family income, usually by some
form of board payment. This arrangement has been men-
tioned by a number of researchers. Herford[7], for exam-
ple,
states, "On the whole there seems to be a recognised
value for board and lodgings irrespective of age, and
relatively few went far above or far below this figure."
Willmott[8] does not, however, bear out this point. He
states,
"Those who earned more naturally gave their
mothers more for their 'keep'."
Three points need to be made about these studies: (i)
they tend to focus on boys (although Paul talks also of
girls he is much more specific on the negotiation of the
amount of "keep" by boys); (ii) it may well be that there
were variations in the method of paying "keep" that were
not of primary interest to the investigators (although Her-
ford does appear to describe two methods); and, most
crucially of all, (iii) the investigators were primarily con-
cerned with the young worker in the home, and not really
concerned with the possible effect of the home ar-
rangements on performance at work. It was Shimmin[9]
who commented clearly on the relationship between the
payment of young workers with the home, and its effect on
work behaviour:
"Thus,
in areas where it is customary for young girls to
hand the whole of their wage packet to their mothers,
receiving in return a fixed amount of pocket money, it
has been found that incentive payment schemes are
unimportant unless steps are taken to ensure that each
girl actually receives her bonus earnings, for example by
giving her two wage packets."
Two papers form the basis of the present study,
Millward[10] and Legge[11]. The former expands and
elaborates the direction given by Shimmin:
"We will use the domestic arrangement by which
mothers contribute to family income to explain changes
in family life and behaviour at work, insofar as this
behaviour is related to the wage payment system and
movements in earnings. This seems a particularly fruit-
ful approach, in that the wage packet is the most impor-
tant, if not sometimes the only, thing which crosses the
boundaries of domestic and working life, besides the
worker
himself."
The arrangements for board payments have been described
in Part I, and the effect of this purely domestic arrange-
ment on performance at work is stated by Millward[12]:
"It would be fair to say then, that all the girls who were in
a position to do so had increased their efforts to earn
bonus when they went on board". And later:
"Our results concur with Shimmin's observation in
that, generally speaking, the girls on board had a higher
level of performance than those who were not. This was
so even after the effects of different age and length of
service had been controlled for as far as possible."
Home Relations and Work Behaviour 23
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