INTRODUCTION:

Andersson and Bateman (1997) defines Organizational Cynicism (OC) as “an attitude characterized by frustration, hopelessness and disappointment, as well as derision toward and distrust of the organization”. While Dean et al., (1998), defines Organizational Cynicism as following: “A negative attitude toward one’s employing organization and has theorized three dimensions for it, namely,

1) Belief, that the organization lacks integrity and principles of integrity, honesty and earnestness.

2) Affect, which is the emotional response, like feelings of dislike and anger, born out of the cynical beliefs.

3) Behaviour, which is the inclination towards negative responses like non-verbal cues such as rolling of eyes, smirks and smears.

Work-life conflict arises when an individual experiences feelings of dissatisfaction due to the lack of balance between personal and professional lives. Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) defines Work-Life Conflict as a type of inter-role conflict which arises when responsibilities from the work and family spheres are not attuned and have a negative impact on both the work and family life. Frone, Russell and Cooper (1992) have identified two types of work-family conflict that are work-interfering-with family (WIF) and family-interfering-with-work (FIW). When work-related activities interfere with personal responsibilities, WIF occurs and FIW conflict takes place when personal responsibilities hinder work activities.

Carol Ryff’s (as cited in Living Meaning, n.d., para.5) defines Psychological Well-being as being multi-dimensional and not simply about happiness or positive emotions. She purports that a good life is balanced and whole, engaging each of the different aspects of well-being, instead of being narrowly focused. She further categorizes Psychological Well-being into six categories, namely: Self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others, environmental mastery and autonomy.

In a patriarchal country like India it is tough to be in the role of a working mother. In the Indian scenario, though women are now largely encouraged and supported to go to work, they are still expected to fulfil their traditional roles, that of a home-maker and the primary care taker of the family. The progression of a woman from being just the home-maker to a career driven mother has increased the challenges for the woman who must juggle between child-care, family and work. Kumar (2016) says on a normal day, a woman has to make breakfast, pack lunch in advance for everybody, get the kids ready for school and has get ready for office. Then after a tiring day at work, the women have to come home, clean the house, cook, tend to the needs of the child and spouseandsustain the family life. Though the percentage of men who share the responsibility of nurturing a child and household duties have increased, they do not have the obligations that a mother has.

The challenges for a working mother increases when the person has to maintain the efficiency at the work place too. Furthermore, once she becomes a mother, the role is under scrutiny due to the new status. It is not an unknown fact that time and again organizations show scepticism towards women employees when they get pregnant or are on their initial years of motherhood. There are circumstances where women have faced pregnancy discrimination whereby women are treated disparagingly based on pregnancy, childbirth or related conditions. This scepticism could be arising out of the employer’s belief that new mothers have more responsibilities to handle outside work which might lower their productivity at work.

LITERATURE REVIEW:

There are studies that have found that women are indeed discriminated and penalized upon acquiring the status of a mother. In a study by Cuddy, Fiske and Glick (2004), it was found out that people reported having less interest in hiring, promoting, and educating working mothersas compared to working fathers and childless employees. Budig and England (2001) have found that mothers are indeed discriminated when it came to pay and promotion as compared to women who did not have children. Vitelli (2014) states that regardless of the growing number of working mothers in the workforce, they still face incredible challenges including the limited availability of day-care as well as frequent discrimination by employers.

Studies have found that when treated uncivilly, employees became more cynical of their organizations or supervisors. A study by Nazir and Ahmed (2016) and Ayyub, Awan and Bilaly (2013) both found a positive correlation between workplace incivility and Organizational Cynicism. The study byGalletta, Portoghese, Ciuffi, Sancassiani, D'Aloja and Campagna (2016), revealed that if Organizational empowerment was low, the positive association between exhaustion and cynicism is significantly strong.

When Özler and Atalay (2011) studied the relationship between Organizational Cynicism and burnout, they found no significant relationship between the dimensions. A strong negative relationship between cynicism and organization-based self-esteem was found by Naus (2007).Johnson and Kelly (2003)found that affective cynicism fully mediated the relationship between psychological contract breach and emotional exhaustion, suggesting that cynical attitudes have negative consequences for the attitude holder.

Meier, Musick, Flood and Dunifon (2017) found that mothers working full-timereported less happiness, more stress, and more fatigue in parenting than those with other work arrangements. Results of Gassman-Pine’s (2013) study found that lower-than-average and higher-than-average workload days were associated with increased negative and tired mood, decreased positive mood, and increased harsh mother–child interactions.Self-reports from these mothers indicated reduced physical and mental health and low satisfaction with family life and parenthood.

NEED FOR THE STUDY:

The above literature reviews suggests that women do face discrimination and penalty on becoming a mother and that they also have a difficult time juggling their personal and professional life, especially, since they are under constant scrutiny from their employers. However, not much attention has been paid to the effects the challenges have on their psychological health. There has hardly any studies been conducted on finding how the challenges of being a working mother, with pressure both from work and personal life could affect them, especially on the Indian context. Therefore, this study focuses in examining the effect of Organizational Cynicism and Work-Life balance on the Psychological well-being of first time mothers in IT and ITES sector in Bangalore. The motive of this study is to shed light and bring to attention the effects of cynicism and work-life conflict on the well-being of first time working mothers. If more studies are done focusing on the issues related to mothers, especially ones with children in their infancy or early childhood, attention of organization’s policy makers can be drawn towards the matter and hopefully better strategies are developed to cater to the needs of the mothers. This study will also add to the knowledge data-base of the research field of Industrial Psychology. Further explorations can be continued so that it can be useful in building a healthier organization culture across the country and other parts of the world.

Purpose:

To study the relationship among Organization Cynicism, Work-life Conflict and Psychological Well-being among first time mothers in IT and ITES sectors in Bangalore.

OBJECTIVES:

1. To examine the correlation between Organizational Cynicism and Psychological Well-being.

2. To examine the correlation between Work-life Conflict and Psychological Well-being.

3. To examine the correlation between Organizational Cynicism and Work-life Conflict.

HYPOTHESES:

1. There is no significant correlation between Organizational Cynicism and Psychological Well-being.

2. There is no significant correlation between Work-life Conflict and Psychological Well-being.

3. There is no significant correlation between Organizational Cynicism and Work-life Conflict.

METHOD:

The research design was a quantitative study and used correlational research design. Variables of the study were Organization Cynicism, Work-life Conflict and Psychological Well-Being.Purposive and Snowball sampling method was employed. Samples selected were first time mothers from IT and ITES sector. Sample size was 50. The mothers had a minimum of 2 years of work experience prior to child birth. They had worked for not more than 1.5 years after returning from maternity leave. They were working at an Operating level at the time of the research and not managerial. They were all working in IT and ITes companies based inside Bangalore. No mothers suffered from any physical or psychological conditions. Single mothers were excluded from participating.

Procedure:

For those questionnaires that were handed in person, a rapport was built between the administrator and the subject. The administrator made sure that the subject had understood the instructions given. The participants were briefed about the study, explained about the research, instructions, ethical considerations, confidentiality and an informed consent was obtained from the participants. The participants were then given the questionnaires for OrganizationalCynicism, Work-life balance and Personal Well-being. Responses were collected from all the participants for all the three questionnaires and the data was calculated and analyzed.

For the ones that were sent via email, respondents were sent the questionnaires in the form of google docs along with the instructions and the consent form.

Instrument:

The researcher collected data using the standardized questionnaire tools for three variables: Organizational Cynicism scale by Dean, Brandes and Dharwakar (1998), Work-life Balance Questionnaire developed by Fisher Mcauley (2002) and Psychological Well-being Scale (PWB 20), developed by Mehrotra, Tripathi and Banu (2013), based on Ryff’s PWB model.

Statistical technique adopted:

Pearson Product-Moment Correlation‘ r’

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:

Table 1.

Variables	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
OC (Cognition)	--	-.704**	-.660**	0.083	0.087	-0.125	-0.272
OC (Affect)		--	.697**	-0.078	0.128	-0.04	.455**
OC (Behaviour)			--	-0.017	0.037	-0.005	.325*
PWB (Self- Acceptance)				--	-0.016	0.062	0.064
PWB (Sense of Mastery and Competence)					--	-0.087	-0.058
PWB (Positive Relations)						--	-0.037
PWB (Sense of engagement and growth)							--

Note. OC = Organizational Cynicism. PWB = Psychological Well-being

**p < 0.01, *p < 0.05 N = 50

Table 2.

Variables	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
PWB (Self-Acceptance)	--	-0.016	0.062	0.064	-0.113	0.269	0.229
PWB (Sense of Mastery and Competence)		--	-0.087	-0.058	-0.067	0.235	-0.15
PWB (Positive Relations)			--	-0.037	-0.093	-0.189	0.053
PWB (Sense of engagement and growth)				--	-.325*	-0.277	-0.069
WLC (Work interferes with personal life)					--	0.263	0.226
WLC (Personal life interferes with work)						--	0.074
WLC (Work personal life enhancement)							--

Note. PWB = Psychological Well-being. WLC = Work-life Conflict*p < .05 N = 50

In relations to hypothesis 3, the correlation between the Affective dimension of Organizational Cynicism and Personal life interferes with work dimension of Work-life Conflict is .311, which is significant at 0.01 level. The table also shows, the correlation between the Behavioural dimension of Organizational Cynicism and Personal life interferes with workdimension of Work-life Conflict is .326, which is significant at 0.05 level.From the above results, it can be deduced that when new mothers’ experiences conflict due to the interference of personal life on work life, their affective and behavioural cynicism towards the organization increases.This means that when cynicism towards an organization increases, work-life conflict increases too or vice versa. Balogun (2014) found that work-life conflict and job stress had a significant effect on job burnout. Mitra (2015) also concluded in her study that excessive work load, low job security, lack of motivation from the supervisors led to increase in stress in employees. Stress in turn had a negative impact on the work life balance of these employees.

LIMITATIONS:

Since there were a lot of exclusion criteria, it became very challenging for the researcher to reach the sample population. Lot of time was spent on reaching out to these participants and due to the time constraints, the researcher was not able to continue with a qualitative study after the quantitative phase was over. Had the researcher been able to do a qualitative study, the data and findings would have been a much richer one. Though the researcher was able to describe the relationships among the said variables with regards to the experience of first time mothers in corporate areas, she would have been able to explain why these variables were related in that direction, if an in-depth interview could have been conducted. The sample population is restricted to those living in Bangalore. This would limit the generalization of the findings to the population outside of Bangalore. The sample size of the population is quite small in size, due to the time constraints as the research was done over less than a year time period.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH:

Further research can be done to explain in-depth how the challenges that mothers face can affect their mental and physical health.Research can be conducted to introduce interventions that can be experimented in organizations to decrease the discrimination, cynicism and work-life conflict. Organizations should work towards introducing policies that will help mothers to balance the responsibility of child care and work.

CONCLUSION:

From the study we can conclude that Cynicism towards the organization and Work-life Conflict does have a detrimental effect on the Psychological Well-being of first time mothers working not only in corporate sectors but all others. It is therefore very important that companies recognize this issue as an urgent and serious one. Building of day care facilities in the campus, flexible work hours, required paid offs, child support regulations, therapy and counselling sessions and classes on better parenthood are a few ways in which organizations can extend their support towards these new mothers. This will show the organization’s willingness to help the new mothers in their quest for becoming the best version of themselves in all the roles they play. This will also help them in reducing their challenges and will increase their efficiency not only at work but also as a mother. In turn, the cynicism and insecurities of the mothers will reduce, their commitment will increase and their morale will get boosted. Most importantly, it will ensure the good health of both the mother and the child.

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Received on 03.06.2018 Modified on 12.06.2018

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018; 9(3): 546-550.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2018.00092.X