A Discussion on Perceived Life Quality, Work-Family Conflict, and Workplace Bullying: Challenges for Modern Families and Human Capital

Introduction

Individuals can encounter many conflicts in modern life. For example, ensuring work-family balance has become harder for working individuals due to high workloads and blurred boundaries between one’s personal life and work responsibilities (Miller, 2015). An employee may feel that number of hours they worked has increased, and inherently, the quality of life has been affected. With the rapid growth of industries requiring emotional labor (i.e., service sector), in most societies, psychological problems are increasing. In the same vein, workplace interpersonal problems are widespread in organizational life (i.e., bullying). Thereby, a discourse on workplace spirituality seems promising to provide solutions to the contemporary problems of employees. In doing so, this chapter adopts a holistic approach by incorporating workplace spirituality, work-family conflict, and workplace bullying. More specifically, it is aimed to increase the life quality of working individuals by discussing these concepts.

The ground of the current study is to provide solutions for the problems that arise because of work and their negative effects on the life quality of individuals. Among them, workplace bullying is an obstacle for workforce performance quality, since it negatively influences the life quality of the individuals and may increase the perceived work-life conflict (i.e., Md‐Sidin, Sambasivan, & Ismail, 2010; Rooyen & McCormack, 2013), that is another significant challenge for working individuals with its negative psychological and work outcomes. Specifically, this study provides insight into the bullying experiences of employees and their impacts on quality of life and work-family conflict. Finally, the importance of improving the quality of work-life within the contemporary employment environment, and elimination of negative workplace behaviors for enhancing the wellness of modern families and healthy societies in the 21st century will be discussed from the perspective of workplace spirituality.