Work-family balance is a challenging issue for many working adults. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, employees’ awareness and perception about work-family balance is very limited as compared to the western countries. Academics in Sri Lanka are no exception and they receive very little or no family-friendly support from universities as they struggle to achieve a balance between work and family with their never-ending workload. The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between university academics’ work-family balance and job performance. Further, this study aims to find the dimensional impact of work-family balance on job performance of university academics. With the purpose of accomplishing the aforesaid objectives, a self-administered survey is carried out among 200 university academics from the four largest government universities in Sri Lanka. The sample is selected based on simple random sampling from the management faculties of the respective universities. This study finds a statistically significant positive relationship between work-family balance and job performance among academics. It also finds that a significant positive relationship exists between work-family balance dimensions and job performance. Further, satisfaction balance is identified as the major contributor to job performance.

Work-family balance is a challenging issue for many working adults as it could lead to inter-role conflict as the role demand on one sphere (work) is incompatible with the role demand of another sphere (family) (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985; and Kelloway et al., 1999). As stated by O’Laughlin and Bischoff (2005), balancing parenthood and career is very challenging for all professionals. When both the parents are involved in their work, they have to face time pressure and confront an overlap between work and family. While the Sri Lankan interest in work-family balance is gradually increasing, most employees give first priority to work-related activities as compared to their family involvement. The employees’ awareness and perception about work-family balance is very little in comparison to European countries. The employers also have not given much consideration to work-family balance (Arachchige, 2013). The available research in the Sri Lankan context is more on work-family conflict, especially on dual-career families (Aryee et al., 2005 as cited in Kailasapathy et al., 2014).

Management Research Journal, A Study on the Work-Family Balance, Job Performance of Academics