ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how female top managers in organizations try to balance the relation between work and family life. Top managers are special because they have been given the main responsibility for assuring that a given organization adapts to, and survives in, its particular environment; thus, they are formally, as well as informally, often blamed if an organization does not succeed. As a consequence, the pressure on top managers to perform is different from the pressure put on other types of employees. Female top managers are put under even more pressure because of cultural expectations about women's role as mothers and presumed responsibility for the well-being of the family. The question of how to balance work and family life is therefore even more important and present in everyday work and family life for them than it is for other types of employees. The challenge of succeeding with balancing is also greater. The aim of this chapter is to look into these challenges and to investigate more thoroughly how female top managers balance between work and family life in practice. More specifically, it investigates how a female manager balances between work and family life before, during, and after a crisis that has occurred at home, as well as at work. The study is explorative and is aimed at developing a new type of empirically grounded theoretical understanding of managers balancing, using the efforts of female top managers to create a work and family life balance as an example. In order to investigate this, the following research questions will be addressed:
How do female top managers identify and learn what should be taken into consideration and what should be achieved or avoided in relation to their work–family life balance?
Through what processes are criteria, conditions, and values that are to be realized, or taken into consideration, constructed and decided upon?
What is the content of these criteria, conditions, and values?
Which conflicts arise between these criteria, conditions, and values, and which ones prevail?
What are the consequences for top manager's management and organizing processes?
