Women and Work Commitment

Working women has an obligation to fulfill task given at work place. Hence, how committed they are at work will depends on the objective of their commitment, whether they work because they like it, or whether they scared of losing their job. John Meyer and Natalie Allen developed Three Component Model of Commitment (1991) which explained that commitment to an organization is a psychological state, and that it has three distinct components that affect how employees feel about the organization that they work for. The three components are affective commitment (affection for self-job), continuance commitment (fear of loss) and normative commitment (sense of obligation).

Working women with continuance and normative commitment may feel stress, bored and unmotivated. Consequently, it will give negative implication to their behavioral action and decision such as low job satisfaction, exiting from work force and discouraging them to continue remain in a work force.

The statistic from the Statistic Department of Malaysia have shown that women's participation in work force does contribute to both economic growths especially through paid work.  Paid work is referring to any work that will be paid in return for the work done and completed (Shahra Razavi, James Heintz, Shahra Razavi, Papa Seck, Silke Staab, Laura Turquet, 2015).Women participation in labor force is contributing to the skill and non-skill work force which produce products and services. Higher women employment is good for long -term financing of social security systems with cost of an ageing population and rebalance the economic dependency ration (Thévenon, 2010).

Generally, most working people in Malaysia which includes, spend more time on work commitment. A survey was reported that Malaysian work an average of 15 hours more than their contracted hours week, surpassing Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia (Fong, 2017). This survey showed that Malaysia employee, that includes women are very commited with their work. BBC News reported that Asian countries, that including Malaysia tend to work the longest (hours) (Stephenson, 2012). Even though they work more hours but working longer doesn't mean productivity increase yet longer working hour is always associated with lower productivity. As such, Malaysian employees are overwhelmed, stressed, and leading to unhealthy lifestyle, consequently, it is leading to productivity loss (Fong, 2017). Generally, this fact showed that working women in Malaysia is overloaded with work commitment.

Overloaded with work commitment and family demand as well as household work will causes stresses to working women which then will may lead them to exit or discourage them to participate in work force. Therefore, a support facility such as Flexible Working Arrangement at work place is accommodating for the working women to juggle their time with both roles.

Flexible Working Arrangement in many studies and research has shown positive relations with Work-Life Balance and reduce Work-Life Conflict (A. Gettha Subramaniam, 2015) (Jasmine Lee Mee Choo, 2015).  Providing Flexible Working Arrangement at work is one of the support facilities that will help the working women to gain work-life balance, reduce work-life conflict and retain their commitment to work as well as to attract women participation in work force.