We all have multiple roles we hold and play throughout life. Work and family are two of the most competing and salient roles in every individual’s life.
Individuals often make behavioural decisions based on their relative salience (work or family) to these life roles. Role salience refers to the importance that a person assigns to different role identities in their work and family domains.
Role salience fundamentally outlines the life roles that are most important for an individual. Individuals who have family salience tend to highly value their family lives. They see family as “a permanently executed practice centred on care obligations” and give priority to their family and secondary importance to their work roles.
Individuals who have work salience are more eager to spend extra effort at work and to achieve career success. Generally, people are devoted to dedicating more time to the roles they consider most important with the objective of fulfilling the expectations and responsibilities associated with the most salient role.
Regarding women entrepreneurs, given that family and work are central to their lives as they view both roles as mutually inclusive, the overlapping nature of these roles may influence how they manage and grow their businesses based on the salience they place on their family and work roles.
Managing family and work responsibilities poses a challenge to women entrepreneurs as the time they spend on one role reduces the time and efforts they can spend on the other.
Nevertheless, although women entrepreneurs juggle multiple roles at once, these roles differ in their varying levels of importance. Some could be peripheral, while others could be considered prominent (salient).
The salience of work and family roles has consequences on the level and type of work-family conflict individuals could potentially experience. This has significant implications for women entrepreneurs, especially regarding growth intentions. While role salience might be imperative for growth, it is widely established that women always strive to balance their work and family domains.
Most of their growth decisions might be centred on whether or not they are capable of maintaining an adequate level of work-life balance.
The findings revealed that work role salience is one of the fundamentals that drive women entrepreneurs to aspire to develop and expand their businesses.
Several women, globally, are making increasing strides towards the advancement of their careers outside of the home. Although not limited to traditional gender-specific roles and venturing into the business world, many women still shoulder a greater portion of family responsibilities.
This is evident in some families in the developing world, where the traditional gender roles and stereotypical beliefs of men being given the primary role as the breadwinners and women as the nurturers of children and the homemakers exist.
This has resulted in productive and reproductive labour being unevenly distributed, with reproductive labour being assigned mainly to women.
– Prof. Brownhilder Neneh, associate professor and academic head (HOD) of the Department of Business Management at the University of the Free State (UFS).
