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Article Excerpt
While few managers or professionals find the prospect of uprooting their families appealing, their organizations continue to place a premium on geographic relocation (Rodgers & Rodgers, 2000), not only as a developmental tool, but also to be responsive to environmental changes (Rodgers & Rodgers, 2000), as well as corporate restructuring (Feldman & Bolino, 1998; Sagie, Krausz, & Weinstain, 2001). With the growing number of two income families in today's workforce (Nicholson, 1996), as well as the increased number of women in the managerial and professional ranks (Powell & Graves, 2003), we need to better understand how family and gender issues impact an individual's willingness to relocate (Brett, Stroh, & Reilly, 1993; Sagie et al., 2001).
Although geographic relocation has been examined in both domestic and international contexts, as well as plant relocations, individual domestic moves are by far the most frequent and common for managers and professionals (Landau & Arthur, 1990; Landau, Shamir, & Arthur, 1992). In this context, however, the role that family plays remains unclear because researchers have primarily assessed the influence of family indirectly using marital or parental status, often producing inconsistent findings. Moreover, the generalizability of several of these studies has been limited by the sample populations used, which have tended to either under-represent women (e.g. Noe & Barber, 1993) or have resulted in comparisons between men and women who were significantly mismatched in age and marital status (e.g. Landau et al., 1992).
To address these limitations, we use a market model of family migration (Bielby & Bielby, 1992) to help ground our selection of family attributes rather than relying upon indirect assessments. Then, to address under-representation and mismatch issues, we test our hypotheses using survey data from 666 managers and professionals (333 male and 333 female) comparatively matched by age ([+ or -] 5 years), organization, division, location and functional area. Beyond these improvements, our study makes three additional contributions. First, it extends Bielby and Bielby's (1992) research (which focused primarily on gender and the role of provider and examined willingness of workers to relocate for family concerns based on data gathered in 1977) to today's managers and professionals. Second, it uses a more hilly-specified model by examining attributes related to families' overall economic and socio-emotional well-being, while controlling for previous determinants of willingness to relocate. And third, given the asymmetry by which men and women respond to relocation opportunities due to family obligations and concerns (Brett, 1997), it examines the moderating role of gender using a comparatively matched sample of male and female managers and professionals.
Theory and hypotheses
Family attributes and willingness to relocate
The literature on domestic relocation is fairly extensive, with scholars also interested in non-managerial/professional employees' willingness to relocate or change jobs/accept mobility opportunities, as well as the psychological costs of relocation/adjustment. While this literature helps inform our theory development, to frame our study we also drew upon a neoclassical market model of family migration that argues that managers and spouses act to maximize family well-being such that both monetary and non-monetary costs and benefits must be taken into consideration (De Jong & Gardner, 1981). Using this model, Bielby and Bielby (1992) examined how family ties and obligations influence the reluctance of full- and part-time workers over the age of 16 to relocate for a much better job. While they examined the influence of gender, managers and professionals were only a small subset of their sample, and systematic difference between the men and women meant that fine-grained comparisons were not possible. In addition, while Bielby and Bielby studied an individual's reluctance to relocate within /the context of getting a better job, the measure did not capture all the various dimensions of managers and professionals' willingness to relocate identified by Landau and colleagues (1992), such as relocating to save one's current job or moving for professional development reasons. Moreover, Bielby and Bielby (1992) focused primarily on gender-role theory as it relates to the role of provider--that is, economic gains and losses--and did not fully explore the socio-emotional concerns of family members facing a relocation decision.
At the most fundamental level, marital status and parental status have been used to define family boundaries. Yet, while some have found a direct influence of marital status, specifically that married professionals are less willing to relocate (i.e. Markham, Macken, Bonjean, & Corder, 1983), others found no influence when attributes of a spouse were taken into consideration (Brett et al., 1993; Eby & Russell, 2000; Landau et al., 1992; Noe & Barber, 1993). Similarly, although Brett and Reilly (1988) found that parental status was negatively related to willingness to relocate, Eby and Russell (2000) concluded that parental status was positively related when spouse's concerns were accounted for, and Gould and Penley (1985) found no effect. Given these mixed findings based on indirect assessments of family attributes, we identified four salient family attributes that influence willingness to relocate, including spouse's contribution to family income, spouse's community ties, the presence of preschool-aged children at home and children's community ties.
Spouse's contribution to family income
In terms of a spouse's career, several past studies on related phenomena have examined the impact of spouse's employment status but found mixed results. For example, Gould and Penley (1985) found a positive relationship, Noe and Barber (1993) found no relationship and Markham and colleagues (1983) found a negative relationship between spouse's employment status and willingness to relocate. According to the market model of family migration, managers considering relocation act to maximize family well-being even when it conflicts with their personal best interest (Blood & Wolf, 1960; Heer, 1983; Rodman, 1972), and as a spouse's contribution to family income increases, so does the financial cost of relocation due to the potential loss of spousal earnings. While two previous studies examined the influence of spouse's contribution to family income on willingness to relocate and found no relationship, we believe that further examination is warranted because one study was limited to one organization (Noe & Barber, 1993), and the other only included managers who had been transferred 2 years prior to the study (Stroh, Brett, & Reilly, 1992); and, equally important, the theoretical arguments for inclusion of this construct are sound. For instance, while a spouse may well find work in the new community, a longitudinal study of the financial impact of relocation showed that, while relocated workers realized lasting benefits in terms of higher wages, their spouses showed no significant gain (Sagie et al., 2001). Moreover, Eby (2001) found that relocated spouses were generally worse off 'in terms of traditional indicators of objective career success such as salary and benefits and opportunity for promotion and advancement' (p. 357). Following from this, we suggest that the relative importance of a spouse's contribution to household income will be an important predictor of a manager's willingness to relocate. Therefore, we expect that:
Hypothesis 1. Spousal contribution to family income is negatively related to willingness to relocate.
Spouse's community ties
While a spouse's career is clearly important, it can also be expected that a spouse, whether employed or not, may form important community ties that could negatively impact a manager's decision to relocate. In fact, spouse's dissatisfaction has been shown to be an important factor in resistance to relocation (Munton, Forster, Altman, & Greenbury, 1993). In particular, it has been suggested that managers may resist relocation if their spouse is tied to a particular location and, thus, how a manager perceives the community ties of his or her spouse may impact upon relocation decisions (Veiga, 1983), Simply put, the loss of social and family support groups is often a substantial non-monetary cost of relocation (Rodgers & Rodgers, 2000). Past studies have examined the importance of community tenure, or what is sometimes referred to as the community integration hypothesis, and have shown a negative relationship...
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