Work-family conflict in tourism sector: A survey on 4 and 5 star hotels in Ankara

Family and work are two important fields in a human being?s life. The roles and responsibilities needed by these two happening simultaneously results in a conflict between work-family roles. This conflict negatively affects both the individual?s life and organization?s performance. Main factors causing work-family conflict are irregular and heavy working conditions. It is an inevitable fact for a tourism sector worker that s/he would face work-family conflict sometime because of intense, stressful and long working hours. Bearing this fact in mind, this study aims to reveal work-family conflicts that hotel employees? may be experiencing and to determine whether these conflicts differ in terms of demographic and individualistic characteristics. In order to reach this goal a questionnaire was administered to 217 managers and 375 employees of 4 and 5 star hotels operating in Ankara.The questionnaire consists of two parts, first of which contains questions to determine the demographic and other individualistic characteristics of participants. The second part contains 33 items related to reveal work-family conflict.In this study, using t test for independent samples and variance analyses, whether the opinions on the work-family conflict of the participants vary according to individual and enterprise-related characteristics.Results pointed out a significant difference in perceptions of participants? work-family conflict dimensions and reveal that they are experiencing time based work-family conflict more than other types of work-family conflict. Time based work-family conflict is followed by strained based work-family conflict , behavior based work-family conflict and family-work coflict consecutively. The results showed that there are no significant meaningful differences between gender, marital status, having children, social security status, work positions, work durations and factors that make up work-family conflict of participants. On the other hand meaningful differences were observed between spouse?s employment status, age, educational status, working departments, total employment in tourism sector and factors of work-family conflict.Keywords: Work-family conflict, Tourism sector, Work-family conflict in tourism sector.