Work-life balance: A landscape mapping of two decades of scholarly research

Abstract

Work-life balance has gained increasing popularity among scholars and practitioners since the beginning of the century. Despite significant attempts to consolidate this burgeoning field, the scholarly knowledge on work-life balance research remains fragmented and detached due to extant number of publications in the area and the mostly subjective approaches used to encapsulate the literature. As such, the current study presents an objective overview of work-life balance research between 2000 and 2020. Using bibliometric techniques, the authors examined 1190 articles indexed in Scopus database to identify the conceptual structure and current dynamics in the field. During the critical period between the reconceptualization of word-life balance and the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic, the findings reveal that the field was growing exponentially as a multidisciplinary research area. Most of the scholarly work originated in the US, UK, and Australia with a "locally-centralized-globally-discrete" collaboration pattern among scholars. The most relevant and developed research themes included, in addition to work-life balance, topics related to gender and family life. Furthermore, new emerging research directions had evolved beyond the traditional constructs including job security, flexible working hours, individual productivity, and work-life conflicts. The study contributes to the current knowledge on work-life balance by providing critical insights into the evolution of the field and offers potential avenues for scholars who are interested in this critical research domain and the changes it has experienced post pandemic.

1. Introduction

In 2015, all UN member states approved 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aiming at achieving global peace and prosperity. Among these goals, SDG 8 focuses on providing full and productive employment and decent work for all. This latter sub-objective, i.e., the creation of decent work conditions, makes it imperative that researchers and practitioners devote substantial resources to achieving harmony between work and life demands. The Work-Life Balance (WLB) concept has garnered increasing scrutiny from scholars since its inception [1,2]. The increasing prominence of WLB concerns in the discourse of political and business leaders, human resource strategies, and the media triggered a theoretical and practical rethinking of their related constructs in empirical research [3]. These concerns, in turn, emerged due to a significant shift in technology and demography within industrialized societies. WLB remains one of the most researched paradigms in diverse fields such as psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management [4,5]. A resurgence of interest in the field has arisen in the past decades due to numerous pressing challenges, such as the growing number of women in the workplace, single-parent households, mothers returning to the workforce, and dual-career families [[6], [7], [8]]. On the one hand, these challenges have triggered employees to reconsider their family life roles and employers and face the growing demands for flexible working practices and a more sustainable workforce [9].

Balancing work with family responsibilities in ways that reduce their conflict and provide satisfaction for individuals' needs and desires creates a solid and theoretically grounded foundation for researchers and practitioners [10]. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the conflict between work and family demands may result in many adverse job-related outcomes [[11], [12], [13]]. The need for more balance resulted in the creation of a plethora of new perspectives and theories that conceptualized the work-family construct as a mechanism explaining variance in work outcomes [14,15]. More recently, researchers went beyond the conflict perspective to include enrichment as a positive outcome of work-family relationships [16,17]. Subsequently, WLB scholars have been attracted to explore new concepts and perspectives to capture all aspects of the balance between employees’ work and personal lives [3,18,19].

WLB is being addressed not only in the domains of human resource management and organizational behavior but also in other disciplines, such as economics [20], information technology [10], sociology [21], and psychology [22], to determine both its antecedents and consequences. Relatedly, WLB has been approached using various theoretical perspectives, including social cognitive theory [23], role accumulation theory [24], cybernetic theory [7], person-environment fit theory [25], institutional theory [26], planned behavior theory [27], family systems theory [28], work/family border theory [29], conservation of resources theory (COR) [30], and boundary theory [31]. Despite, or maybe partly as a result of, these various theoretical perspectives, scholars argue that the field remains chaotic and inconclusive [16,32]. The growing body of literature and the substantial human impact of WLB have elicited various recent reviews. For example, Byron [33] conducted a meta-analytic review of more than 60 studies to examine the impact of work, non-work, and demographics on work interference with family and family interference with work. Casper et al. [34] conducted a methodological review of work-family research published in industrial-organizational (IO) psychology and organizational behavior (OB) journals over a period of 24 years. Eby et al. [11], in a monograph review of 238 articles, examined the content analysis and reviewed the literature on work and family research published in IO/OB journals. Despite the significant implications of meta-analytic reviews, methodological choices, and monograph reviews, bibliometric analyses of the various empirical research methods on WLB are scarce.

The inconducive systematic reviews stirred the need to conduct a bibliometric analysis in the field. Notable exceptions include Franco et al. [35], Franco et al. [36], and Rashmi and Kataria [37]. These studies were area or field-specific and mapped a very limited period, thus failing to fully demonstrate the nature of the field and the different ways it is embedded in the literature. To address this gap and offer the much-needed adjustment to the WLB research agenda, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the literature using rigorous bibliometric analysis techniques that review the empirical and conceptual work-life balance literature published between 2000 and 2020.

The rationale for using bibliometric analysis in this paper is well justified as there remains a paucity of methodological guidelines within the management sciences and, more specifically, in the domain of WLB on how to address the readily available information to obtain a state-of-the-art understanding, identify the knowledge discrepancies, and recommend avenues for future research in the field. By providing a review that tackles these concerns, researchers and policy makers can benefit from the solid findings that emerge from the results and build on the premises of previous empirical studies. More specifically, this paper tries to investigate five main questions.

• 1How did the research on WLB evolve over the first two decades of the new Century?
• 2Who are the authors, and what are the sources and articles have had the most noticeable influence in the field?
• 3What are the primary author, institutional, and national collaborative relationship maps in this area of research?
• 4What is the geographic atlas of WLB research across countries and regions?
• 5What are the thematic trends and possible burgeoning areas to explore in the field of WLB?

To answer these questions, we examined 1190 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Scopus database and published between 2000 and 2020 before the COVID pandemic. We approach this topic from a social network analysis perspective, delineating the fit between the expectations and realities of work and life.

Our paper contributes to the literature in two different ways. First, because WLB as a construct is still in a state of evolution and is subject to interdisciplinary debate, the study develops a comprehensive review of the WLB literature over two decades to allow researchers interested in the subject to trace the development of this field by establishing article-author associations and revealing the trending topics/hotspots within the broader research thematic sphere. As such, management scholars and practitioners will be able to identify the crucial knowledge gaps in the literature and position their contributions within the established research stream [38]. Second, previous reviews use meta-analyses of findings, monographs, and methodological reviews to present the empirically grounded theories of WLB. The selection of articles, in most cases, is the function of authors’ subjective views of the field, which generates inconsistency across authors or periods. Our work offers a roadmap for the future of WLB research without subjective bias and thus provides a more systematic, consistent, transparent, replicable, and rigorous review process [39,40].

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we review the WLB-related work and then present the methodological underpinnings of the research in section 3. The results of the literature landscape mapping are provided in section 4. Finally, we discuss the implications and limitations of research on WLB and develop a framework for future research in section 5.

2. Literature review

Undertaking a bibliometric analysis of the WLB literature constitutes a key research objective for scholars and practitioners and a tool to map, assess, and develop the body of knowledge of the related field [41]. For example, in the last two decades, various field-wide reviews of work-life balance literature have had different aims and points of focus. Rashmi and Kataria [37] summarized the various WLB theories presented and utilized in 945 conceptual and empirical articles published in 10 journals between 1998 and 2020. Franco et al. [36] investigated 53 articles indexed in Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science (2005–2020) and uncovered a set of variables related to WLB among teachers in higher education. Franco et al. [35] analyzed 58 empirical research papers published in 38 journals and indexed in the Scopus database between 2006 and 2020 and identified several factors that led articles to get cited, such as job satisfaction, health, and safety among engineering professionals. In addition, the authors' thematic analysis uncovered organizational policies and climate and work conditions as mediating factors in WLB research. Thilagavathy and Geetha [42] looked at 201 articles indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science, using a three-step morphological approach to investigate employee WLB from 1991 to 2019. A systematic literature review by Fan et al. [43] focused on analyzing the role of WLB support systems in reducing individuals' stress arising from external multilevel social systems. The review contained 384 articles and book chapters published from 1960 to 2019 and covered four areas, including (a) conceptualizing WLB, (b) socio-ecological theory perspectives of multilevel analysis, (c) multidimensional typological aspects, and (d) a pluralist multitask-holder approach. Vadvilavičius and Stelmokienė [44] investigated 12 articles on work-family conflicts and enrichment interventions of WLB, using a systematic literature review that covered three decades (1991–2019). Wong et al. [45] conducted a meta-analysis of 58 articles retrieved from Google Scholar, Science Direct, ProQuest, Medline, and PubMed databases. This analysis was skewed toward assessing the relationship between WLB and employee career motivation, attendance, recruitment, and retention. Le et al.’s [46] systematic review of WLB literature from 1991 to 2018 in the Asian region focused on analyzing how WLB is conceptualized and measured. Pathak et al. [47] provided a comprehensive summary of WLB's antecedents and highlighted that WLB cannot be separated from organizational job satisfaction, profitability, and productivity. Liu et al. [48] bibliometric analysis included 6364 articles published between 1901 and 2017 in the Web of Science. Results revealed six thematic WLB clusters, including work hours, physical fatigue, and work-life experience. Rao and Sharma [49] review of 34 articles published between 1987 and 2018 was limited to issues affecting employees' physical, occupational, emotional, social, spiritual, and family environments and well-being. Sirgy and Lee [50] conducted an integrated literature review of empirical articles published between 1990 and 2015. The authors focused on analyzing various conceptualizations of WLB. They narrowed the search to employee engagement related to work and non-work life concepts and conflicts between social roles at work and non-work life. The authors summarized the WLB conflicts in terms of three conceptual subsets related to work, non-work, and stress conflicts. Apart from organizational performance perspectives, the work focused on WLB antecedents, and consequences at the individual and family levels, thus curbing the scope of the research. Building on Wollard and Shuck's [51] analysis of antecedents of employee engagement and Kim et al.’s [52] review of the consequences of employee engagement on performance, Motyka [53] focused on employee engagement and performance as precursors of WLB. The authors stated that WLB is an effective mechanism and a potential solution for performance issues and proposed WLB activities to enhance employee engagement such as making the work meaningful, easy to understand, and beneficial for employees. However, the review did not provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the literature.

Mehta and Kundanani [54] mapped the WLB literature within an Indian context. The authors categorized the WLB literature into organizational support, work-family conflict, workplace stress, work-life equilibrium, and hidden issues. The authors provided empirical evidence that women have been treated unequally compared to men at work. The results demonstrated that developing and implementing WLB policies in India can be daunting. Hashmi et al. [55] assessed 38 empirical research publications on WLB, including 26 articles from developed countries and 12 from developing countries, to examine pharmacists' job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in Pakistan. the authors uncovered work overload, extended work hours, a lack of support and increasing workplace conflicts, difficulties commuting to work, lack of social support from family and co-workers, and poor physical work conditions as the main drivers of that dissatisfaction. Singh's [56] review summarized key variables and discussed some critical WLB definitions and policy issues until 2012. The author also analyzed the literature on the perceptions of males and females towards WLB and found that women and men perceive WLB differently depending on their socially assigned roles and life priorities. For example, working mothers experience conflict between their primary roles and work. The work added to our knowledge of WLB by showing that its meaning varies by individual and gender. Chang et al. [3] identified 245 peer-reviewed empirical research articles dealing with WLB published between 1987 and 2006 with a narrow focus on individuals' behavior. They proposed future research to consider work and non-work life as crucial dimensions of WLB. Additionally, the researchers suggested that there is a greater demand for work flexibility due to changing technologized work patterns and increasing dual-earner couples, single-parent, and same-sex households. The authors also contended that properly conducted field experiments are critical in establishing causal relationships between chosen variables to maintain consistency in terms of conceptualization and operationalization aspects of WLB research.

While these reviews showed the complicated nature of the WLB field and advanced the literature in different ways, they suffered from several limitations. First, previous reviews often narrow the scope of investigation to WLB constructs, overlooking related constructs that are frequently examined by WLB researchers, such as gender discrepancy and the inequality between men and women, the impact of different forms of contextual (situational) factors, organizational culture, work-related stress, employee burnout, and the lack of fit workplaces [35,36]. Rashmi and Kataria [37] posit that many of these limitations are due to inadequate analytical research using bibliometric analysis, leading reviews to fail at providing a comprehensive overview of the WLB research landscape. Second, some reviews are lacking in terms of number of analyzed articles, focusing only on a subset of WLB literature using subjective inclusion and exclusion criteria and leading to findings that are limited in scope [35,36,44,45,49,55]. Third, some reviews, although inclusive in terms of the methodological aspect, were not comprehensive enough to explain the overall landscape of WLB literature as they were limited to a few databases that are known to have limited coverage, such as EbcsoHost, ProQuest, Academic Source Elite, Business Source Elite, and Psychinfo [3,49]. Last, some works are limited to a specific geographic area; thus, a generalizability argument is unlikely [46,57].

These gaps in the literature reviewed led us to conduct this comprehensive WLB review using bibliometric analysis to provide readers with a birds-eye view of the field's current status and to motivate future researchers to expand the discipline's scope by exposing weaknesses and potential avenues for investigation. Our bibliometric landscape mapping integrates quantitative and qualitative data, enabling researchers to examine and exemplify vast amounts of information using graphical and statistical tables. This landscape analysis of previous publications can also generate a deeper understanding of research trends and possible publication destinations and illustrate scientific connections and patterns of growth in the field of WLB [58].

3. Methods

The massive increase in scientific research worldwide has resulted in complex problems for scholars on how to accurately trace the developments and directions in a particular research domain [59]. Given the fragmented and interdisciplinary nature of scientific research, unlike other literature review methodologies that are prone to the subjective biases of authors, bibliometric analysis techniques, which are quantitative methodologies that utilize bibliometric data such as citation counts, author affiliations, and references used, provide an objective and concise way to analyze large volume of scholarly works to advance theory and practice [38]. With advancements in Bibliometric tools and software, scholars can trace the research area's evolution, identify the literature gaps, and uncover emerging and promising research directions [60.61]. As such, the current study employs bibliometric analysis techniques to evaluate the existing scholarly literature on work-life balance indexed in the Scopus database from 2000 to 2020. We opted to use this technique due to the broad nature of the review and the large number of publications in the field [60].

Several researchers have offered detailed procedures and frameworks on how to conduct a bibliometric analysis, including Linnenluecke et al. [61], Donthu et al. [60], and Mukherjee et al. [38]. In this study, we follow the framework recommended by Donthu et al. [60], which includes four steps: (1) defining the aim and scope of the work; (2) choosing the analysis techniques; (3) collecting the data; and (4) conducting the analysis and reporting findings. In the following parts, we provide a detailed description of each step.

3.1. Aim and scope of the study

The eruption of COVID-19 has drastically affected how we live and work [62]. Several works have been published post-COVID-19 to examine the changes in our understanding of WLB [63]. However, this rapid increase in the number of publications on WLB post-COVID-19 necessitates the existence of a solid and foundational understanding of the state of the field to facilitate scholarly investigation of these rapid developments and align them with an existing body of knowledge in this and related fields [64]. As such, we conducted this research to provide a comprehensive, unbiased overview of the body of knowledge in this critical research domain during the two decades preceding the pandemic, mainly from 2000 to 2020. These milestones present two major “blind spots” in the literature, with the latter being the time during which our focus on work-life began to boom due to the pandemic. The former, on the other hand (i.e., the turn of the Century), has been hailed as the time when the discussion on the interaction of work and non-work-life balance was reconceptualized [65].

3.2. Bibliometric analysis techniques

A bibliometric analysis is a quantitative technique widely employed in the literature to examine research in a particular field [60]. This technique provides valuable insights into the research output and can be grouped into two main categories: performance analysis and science mapping [60]. Performance analysis is a set of descriptive metrics that assess the impact and contribution of the different research constituents in a specific field [66]. These include publication-related metrics, citation-related metrics, and citation-and-publications-related metrics [38]. With its origin in social network theory that describes how the various characteristics of socially connected entities such as authors, institutions, and even nations interact [60], science mapping, on the other hand, provides a visual representation of the knowledge clusters and the interrelationships between constituents in a particular scientific field [67].

In this research, we present several publication-related metrics like the total publications, number of contributing authors, productivity per year, and sole-authored and co-authored publications, along with a set of citation-related measures such as total citations, normalized total citation per document, and citation-and-publication-related measures including collaboration indices and number of cited references, among many others to evaluate the productivity and impact of authors and sources in the field of work-life balance. In addition, we employ citation and co-citation analyses, co-occurrence analysis, and thematic maps to examine the intellectual structure and uncover the major research trends and promising themes in the domain of work-life balance.

3.3. Data collection

The quality of Bibliometric research relies mainly on the accuracy of the data used in the analysis and the inclusion and exclusion criteria [68]. Several databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, PubMed, and Google Scholar, provide bibliometric data. These databases allow for the download of bibliometric data with different features, including the abstract, citation counts, and references, among other things [68]. The literature has a broad debate regarding which database is best for bibliometric research. Given the comprehensive coverage, extensive quality assurance processes, and the accessibility of Scopus, Bass et al. [69] argued that it is considered the most trusted source for large-scale scientific research nowadays. As such, we opted to use Scopus as the source for our data extraction.

The dataset used in this study was extracted from the Scopus database in December 2023. The search Boolean included “work life balance” OR “work-life balance” OR “work-life-balance” OR “WLB” to consider all relevant variants of the keyword in the “article title, abstract, and keywords”. The initial search returned 6169 different scholarly works published in all fields between 2000 and 2020. We then limited our scope to journal articles written in English in the fields of Business, Management, and Accounting, which restricted the results to 1199 publications. We finally ran a full abstract screening to ensure relevancy, which led to the exclusion of a few documents, resulting in the final sample of 1190 articles that were subsequently used in the analysis.

3.4. Analysis and reporting

To perform our analysis, the dataset was downloaded from Scopus in “bibtex” format and processed using R V4.3.3 software, along with bibliometrix, wordcloud, and ggplot2 packages for text mining and data visualization. We then generated the performance metrics to unveil the evolution of work-life balance literature and the contribution of the different research constituents, in addition to the network maps, word cloud, and thematic diagram to identify the conceptual structure of the research domain and uncover future research directions. The results were presented using tables and diagrams and discussed in detail to address the research questions and provide a comprehensive overview of the field. The research procedure is delineated in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

The research procedure.

4. Results

4.1. Descriptive analysis of the literature

A total of 1190 WLB peer-reviewed journal articles were retrieved from Scopus and published between 2000 and 2020 in 390 different journals by authors from 71 countries. According to Table 1, produced via the R-biblimetrix library, the articles were written by 2461 authors. Single-author manuscripts represented 18.5 % (220 articles) of the dataset, while the rest (970 articles) were multi-authored with a collaboration index of 2.4. Overall, the articles had 58,462 references.

Table 1.

Main information about the data.

Description	Results
Timespan	2000–2020
Sources (Journals, Books, etc.)	390
Documents	1190
Average citations per document	21.1
Average citations per year per doc	2.5
References	58462
DOCUMENT TYPES
article	1190
DOCUMENT CONTENTS
Keywords Plus (ID)	810
Author's Keywords (DE)	2865
AUTHORS
Authors	2461
Authors of single-authored documents	220
Authors of multi-authored documents	2241
AUTHORS COLLABORATION
Documents per Author	0.5
Authors per Document	2.1
Co-Authors per Documents	2.5
Collaboration Index	2.4

To answer our first research question regarding the field's evolution, we looked at the temporal trends in research output. As shown in Fig. 2 (produced via R-biblimetrix), one can see an unevenly linear growth rate with a handful of articles published yearly in the first five years from 2000 to 2005 that could represent the nascent stage of WLB research. This early stage was followed by a nearly modest upward trend for about a decade (2006–2015), where one can see a continuous increase in published works yearly. The last five years (2016–2020) show an exponential growth spurt, which indicates that WLB research was emerging at a fast pace. This growth pattern is congruent to that observed in various research areas [[70], [71], [72]].

Fig. 2.

Wlb research annual scientific production (2000–2020).

When it comes to our second research question pertaining to impact, we first analyzed the output of publishing outlets. Table 2 (produced via R-biblimetrix) shows the top 20 journals, with the top five being the International Journal of Human Resource Management with 54 articles, Personnel Review with 35 articles, Gender, Work and Organization with 32 articles, Human Resource Management International Digest with 30 articles, and Work, Employment, and Society with 28 articles. A total of 179 papers were published in the top 5 journals, accounting for 15 % of the total publications. In addition to the simple frequency measure, we used Bradford's law to represent journal influence [73] graphically. The main idea behind this law was proposed by Bradford [74], who stipulated that if one arranges journals based on decreasing article productivity relating to a specific subject, one can delineate the “nucleus” or core of journals dedicated to the topic. A plot of Bradford's law (Fig. 3, produced via R-biblimetrix) clearly shows a core dominated by journals such as the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Personnel Review, Gender, Work and Organization, and Human Resource Management International Digest. This nucleus of journals can be seen as the primary avenue for presenting peer-reviewed research on WLB.

Table 2.

Most relevant sources.

Sources	Articles
International Journal of Human Resource Management	54
Personnel Review	35
Gender Work and Organization	32
Human Resource Management International Digest	30
Work Employment and Society	28
Employee Relations	27
Gender in Management	22
New Technology Work and Employment	17
Journal of Managerial Psychology	16
International Journal of Manpower	14
International Journal of Recent Technology And Engineering	14
International Journal of Applied Business And Economic Research	13
Human Resource Management Journal	12
Women in Management Review	12
Equality Diversity and Inclusion	11
Human Relations	11
Human Resource Management	11
Industrial and Commercial Training	11
Career Development International	10
International Journal of Economic Research	10

Fig. 3.

Bradford's law in WLB scholarly research.

Another way of examining growth in a certain area is to examine the number of documents published based on the authors’ country and whether these articles are produced by authors from single or multiple countries. Fig. 4 (produced via R-biblimetrix) reveals that the top 5 countries that have most contributed to the development of the WLB research are the USA, UK, Australia, India, and Canada. In addition, Fig. 4 shows that, with the exception of China, collaboration in this field happens at the national level with more papers published by authors from a single country.

Fig. 4.

WLB research by corresponding Author's country.

The impact of individual works could be evaluated qualitatively by objectively arguing that a certain publication was seminal in the development of the field. However, a more objective and frequently used metric is citation counts. This metric is based on the valid assumption that the more a work is cited, the stronger its influence on discussions in a particular area. Table 3 (produced via R-biblimetrix) presents the top 20 most cited articles in WLB research. Greenhaus et al.’s [75] paper in the Journal of Vocational Behavior is the most cited (610 citations), almost double that of the runner-up. In this article, the authors examined the sources of conflicts between the domains of work and family roles. The findings show that role conflicts can be conceptualized as (a) time-role-based conflicts, (b) role-produced strain-based conflicts, and (c) behavior-based role conflicts. Thus, the findings depict how fulfilling all roles is challenging and the complexity inherent in the WLB concept. Most importantly, this research developed a model to represent work-family conflict with propositions for future research. The top three articles in terms of average total citation per year are Lyons and Kuron [76], with an average of 34.0 citations, Greenhaus et al. [75], with an average of 32.1 citations, and Haar et al. [19], with an average of 29.1 yearly citations.

Table 3.

Most cited articles.

Paper	Total Citations	TC per Year	Normalized TC
Greenhaus JH, 2003, J VOCAT BEHAV	610	32.1	5.8
Beauregard TA, 2009, HUM RESOUR MANAGE REV	333	25.6	7.0
Kelliher C, 2010, HUM RELAT	328	27.3	8.1
Lyons S, 2014, J ORGAN BEHAV	272	34.0	10.5
Buelens M, 2007, PUBLIC ADM REV	259	17.3	5.2
Lewis S, 2007, INT J HUM RESOUR MANAGE	250	16.7	5.0
Hill EJ, 2003, J VOCAT BEHAV	241	12.7	2.3
Haar JM, 2014, J VOCAT BEHAV	233	29.1	9.0
Smithson J, 2005, GENDER WORK ORGAN	229	13.5	4.8
Macky K, 2008, ASIA PAC J HUM RESOUR	195	13.9	4.6
Perrons D, 2003, GENDER WORK ORGAN	186	9.8	1.8
Emslie C, 2009, GENDER WORK ORGAN	185	14.2	3.9
Watts JH, 2009, GENDER WORK ORGAN	177	13.6	3.7
Sullivan C, 2001, GENDER WORK ORGAN	177	8.4	2.1
Deery M, 2008, INT J CONTEMP HOSP MANAGE	164	11.7	3.9
Vera CF, 2005, FAM BUS REV	162	9.5	3.4
Fleetwood S, 2007, INT J HUM RESOUR MANAGE	161	10.7	3.2
Cogin J, 2012, INT J HUM RESOUR MANAGE	152	15.2	4.3
Lewis S, 2003, LEIS STUD	149	7.8	1.4
Felstead A, 2002, HUM RESOUR MANAGE J	149	7.5	2.6

When it comes to author dominance, one widely used measure (e.g., Elango and Rajendran [77]) is the ratio of the number of multi-authored articles in which an author is the lead author by the total number of multi-authored articles in a data set [78]. Dominance across time is graphically presented in Fig. 5 (produced via R-biblimetrix), which shows that the most influential authors using this ratio were H Lingard from 2002 to 2015, who took a specialized approach to WLB, looking overwhelmingly at the functionality of the concept and mainly in the construction industry. S Lewis dominated from 2001 to 2020 and examined broader areas such as constraints to WLB and the integration of the construct into organizational culture in addition to the macro aspect of WLB at the community and social level, and R Baral dominated from 2010 to 2020 and focused on organizational interventions with an emphasis on work-family enrichment as a mediator between such interventions and organizational outcomes. The figure also reveals the emergence of some leading newcomers to the field, such as A Vasumathi (2015–2020), with a concentration on emotional intelligence and how it affects WLB, and S Pasamar (2013–2020), who linked WLB concepts with organizational innovativeness and enhancing initiatives.

Fig. 5.

Wlb authors dominance over time.

Calculated using Lotka's law [79], one frequently used metric of authors' contribution is the Evenness/Concentration. Lotka's law is based on the application of the well-known Zipf's law that the ratio of the number of authors making a number of contributions to one-contribution authors is almost always 2. Applying this to WLB, we find that Lotka's law holds valid (K–S two sample test p > 0.05), which is a sufficient “proof of concept” that WLB is a significant workplace dimension.

4.2. Network analysis

To answer our third question regarding the various relationships between the works, the outlets they appear in, their authors, institutions, and nations, we conducted an extensive series of analyses that we now describe in detail.

4.2.1. Co-citation networks

A co-citation relationship is created when two authors are cited together in a third reference. The co-citation network for WLB is presented in Fig. 6, with different clusters identifiable by different colors. Two things are worth noticing here. The first is the size of the nodes in the various clusters, as the larger a node is within a cluster, the more influential the authors are in terms of influence on, and control of, knowledge diffusion compared to others in the network [71,80]. Second, the proximity of the nodes to each other. The more proximal or close nodes are, the more common the topics these authors discuss, indicating a stronger ‘homophily-effect’ [81]. As such, homophily can be seen as a measure of thematic similarity within disciplines [82]. Fig. 6 (produced via VOSviewer) shows five different clusters. The homophily effect is evident in Fig. 6 in the nodes representing both K Brown and I Bradley, which are very proximal to each other. Similarly, the effect can be seen in other nodes representing authors such as J Greenhaus, C Higgins, D Major, and C Thompson (the yellow cluster) and that composed of authors such as A Bakker, D Carlson, and D Whitten (the blue cluster). The largest cluster has 181 authors, such as den Dulk, S Lewis, B Beharn, and K Hunt, and is coded in red, while the smallest is the violet cluster with 10 authors that include H Lingard, K Crooker, and R Turner.

Fig. 6.

Wlb author Co-citation network ( ≥ 30 articles).

In a similar fashion to author co-citation networks, one can look at co-cited sources networks within a field. Fig. 7 presents this in the context of WLB research and reveals eight distinct clusters. For example, the red cluster shows that the Work, Employment and Society, Journal of Leisure Research, and Organization Studies are co-cited together as they occupy the same cluster. The green cluster shows that the Journal of Organizational Behavior is co-cited with the Journal of Vocational Behavior, and Stress and Health. The blue cluster shows that Human Resource Management is co-cited with Human Resource Management Journal, whereas Family Business Review is co-cited with the Journal of Business Research in the yellow cluster. Fig. 7 (produced via VOSviewer) also confirms the “orthodox core-heterodox periphery” phenomenon [83] within WLB research. This phenomenon is seen in the centrality of “core” journals in a network and the sparse interaction between the more distinct clusters. This is also consistent with the observation made by Dobusch and Kapeller [84] on how the lopsided focus of citations in favor of articles in orthodox journals compared to heterodox ones that tend to migrate towards the periphery of the network.

Fig. 7.

Wlb source Co-citation network ( ≥ 30 articles).

4.2.2. Collaboration networks

The collaboration networks visually represent author collaborations in two ways. First, as the number of co-authored works increases, so does the intensity or thickness of the lines linking these two authors. Second, the larger the node size associated with an author, the higher the author's number of publications. Together, these two criteria show that in the case of WLB, author collaboration is limited and sparse leading to the conclusion that impactful authors in the field (i.e., those with larger nodes) operate in individual ‘silos’ [85]. Fig. 8 (produced via VOSviewer) depicts these collaboration networks in our sample.

Fig. 8.

Wlb authors collaboration network (documents ≥ 1 article).

The most relevant affiliations for WLB research are presented in Table 4 (produced via R-biblimetrix). Four Australian universities are at the top of the list, including Griffith University, which has 29 articles; Deakin University, which has 28 articles; Monash University, which has 22 articles; and RMIT University, which has 18 articles. Looking at the institutional level collaboration networks, Fig. 9 (produced via VOSviewer) shows that the universities in the UK are the most collaborative (the University of Kent, University of Leicester, and Loughborough University), followed by universities in India (VIT Business School, CET School of Management, and Noorul Islam University), and Australia (Griffith University). The nature of these collaborations fits with what Zou et al. [72] indicated as being “locally-centralized-globally-discrete” with what seems to be a clear “North-South” divide indicating limited collaboration between institutions in developed countries with those in less developed ones.

Table 4.

Most relevant affiliations.

Affiliations	Articles
Griffith University	29
Deakin University	28
Monash University	22
Rmit University	18
Vit University	18
Universidad Politécnica De Cartagena	17
Auckland University of Technology	16
Radboud University Nijmegen	16
Queensland University of Technology	15
Loughborough University	14
Cranfield University	13
York University	13
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak	12
University of Melbourne	12
Bournemouth University	11
Glasgow Caledonian University	11
Universitat De València	11
University of Otago	11
University of South Africa	11
Utrecht University	11

Fig. 9.

Collaboration network among institutions producing WLB research.

Looking at a higher level of analysis, Fig. 10 (produced via VOSviewer) shows that when it comes to the national level, the US leads in collaboration links, followed by the UK, India, Australia, and China. Fig. 11 (produced via R-biblimetrix) plots the “geographic atlas” of the countries producing the WLB research, answering our fourth research question. The figure demonstrates that most collaborations are between authors from the US, Europe, and China. In addition, the figure depicts a limited collaboration between authors from developed and less developed countries, especially African ones.

Fig. 10.

Collaboration network among nations producing WLB scholarly research.

Fig. 11.

Collaboration between nations producing WLB scholarly research.

4.2.3 Keywords and Co-Occurrence Network Analysis.

Our final research question deals with the themes that best describe the field of WLB. This type of investigation utilizes keyword analysis techniques. Authors typically select keywords that reflect the content of the work as they are in the best position to judge the areas and topics that their paper tackles [86]. A simple word cloud based on these keywords is appealing because it can summarize a large amount of textual information simply and visually. As with nodes, the size of the word and its position relative to the center of the cloud are the indicators of its significance, with larger words that are closer to the center being more important. In our extensive list of keywords, “Work-life balance,” “gender,” “job satisfaction,” “women,” and “human resource management” are the most significant, as shown in Fig. 12 (produced via R-biblimetrix).

Fig. 12.

Keyword-based wordcloud of the most frequent WLB terms.

Although a word cloud is visually pleasing, we wanted to augment the analysis by looking at the frequency by which keywords co-occur in the same manuscript. For that purpose, we used the authors’ provided keywords to create a keyword co-occurrence network presented in Fig. 13 (produced via VOSviewer). Five main clusters emerge from the graph. The first cluster (in red) deals with WLB from a human resources perspective and includes words such as “performance,” “stress,” “organizational culture,” and “employee engagement.” The second cluster (in green) deals with gender and equal employment opportunities and includes terms such as “gender,” “women,” “equal opportunities,” and “family life.” The third cluster (in blue) deals mainly with work-life balance constructs including terms such as “work-life balance,” “flexibility,” “telework,” “work-life conflict,” and “work-family conflict.” The fourth cluster (in yellow) bridges the blue and green clusters and includes concepts like “women workers,” “flexible working,” and “quality of life.” The last cluster (in purple) deals with job-related constructs such as “job satisfaction,” “employee attitudes,” and “supervisor support.”

Fig. 13.

Co-occurrence network for author-provided WLB keywords.

Sankey diagrams are plots with three fields that we used to contextualize the flow trends between keywords, sources, and authors (left, middle, and right, respectively), with the width of the boxes constituting the various fields being proportional to the number of keywords, authors, and sources. We present the Sankey diagram originating from our data on WLB in Fig. 14 (produced via R-biblimetrix). As one might expect, keywords such as “work-life balance,” “job satisfaction,” “gender,” and “job satisfaction” had the widest edges, indicating that multiple authors were including these in their manuscripts. In addition, the breadth of the keywords used by some authors (e.g., C Mordi) was more extensive than others with a narrower focus (e.g., K Townsend), indicating more diversity in the research of the former authors than the latter.

Fig. 14.

Sankey plot for WLB research.

4.2.3. Trending topics and thematic evolution

Investigating the topics that were the focus of WLB research across the years, Fig. 15 (produced via R-biblimetrix) shows that there is a shift from established WLB topics such as “equal opportunities” and “job design” (2003–2007), “flexible working hours” and “family friendly organizations” (2007–2011), “career development” and “work-life balance” (2011–2017) to new topics such as “work-family conflict” and “corporate social responsibility” (2017–2019), and “turnover intentions” and “gender inequality” (2019–2020). Since the trendiness of a topic can be indicative of the themes that are of current focus in a research area [[87], [88], [89], [90]], these newer areas of concentration can be seen as “trending topics/hotspots” in WLB. On the other hand, the sudden appearance of some keywords followed by a surge in their use can indicate “potential fronts” [91]. This type of dynamic is not restricted to WLB research as knowledge within a particular discipline typically focuses on topics that become central to the study of that discipline, but then, as that interest tappers down and disappears, these topics get replaced [92]. Such topics demonstrate ongoing debates and hotspots, and we argue that trending topics usually represent hotspots of evolving organizational, technological, and social domains [88].

Fig. 15.

Wlb research trending topics.

4.3. Conceptual structure and thematic maps

Using the author-provided keywords, we ran a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to uncover the conceptual structure of WLB research over the two decades. Fig. 16 (produced via R-biblimetrix) presents that structure and shows that the most significant dimension reduction, accounting for almost 53 % of the total variability, is begotten using the first two MCA dimensions. Closer dots within the graph represent more similar profiles, whereas more separated ones represent discriminating profiles [45]. The figure can also be indicative of the domain's breadth and depth. The green cluster is the largest and includes keywords emphasizing the antecedents and consequences of work-life balance, such as “job satisfaction,” “employee attitudes,” and “employee engagement.” The blue cluster seems to be dealing with gender issues and includes keywords such as “gender,” “family,” and “family life.” The last cluster is presented in red and mainly focuses on flexible work environments. It includes keywords such as “work-family conflict,” “telework,” and “well-being.”

Fig. 16.

Conceptual structure map for WLB scholarly research (MCA method).

Fig. 17 (produced via R-biblimetrix) represents a two-dimensional thematic map or strategic diagram with the horizontal axis representing network centrality and the vertical axis representing network density. The map is divided into four quadrants, each representing a different theme, by dotted lines placed on the average values of each of the two dimensions. The size of the bubble, on the other hand, represents the frequency of documents that report those keywords. The larger the bubble, the greater the frequency. The top right quadrant (high density and high centrality) represents “motor themes” that are internally and externally well-developed [66]. In the context of WLB these include themes such as “work-life balance,” “family life,” “gender,” and “women.” The top left quadrant (high density but low centrality) deals with niche themes that are highly developed but isolated, meaning they are internally well-developed but of marginal importance externally. In the case of WLB, these include themes such as “turnover intentions,” “organizational commitment,” and “work engagement.” The lower left quadrant includes themes such as “leadership,” “retention,” and “communication.” This quadrant (low density and low centrality) reflects emerging or declining themes with weak internal and external ties. The last quadrant on the bottom right (Low density but high centrality) includes themes that are basic and transversal with weak internal but significant external ties, such as “job satisfaction,” “stress,” and “employees.”

Fig. 17.

Wlb research thematic/strategic map.

5. Discussion, conclusion, and implications for research and practice

5.1. Discussion

The current bibliometric analysis explores the epistemological structure of WLB research published between 2000 and 2020 and indexed in the Scopus database. The findings provide a holistic understanding of (a) the evolution of the field; (b) impactful research citations, themes, keywords, authors, and publication outlets; (c) the network of research collaboration among authors, institutions, and nations; (d) the geographic atlas of WLB research; and (e) the thematic trends, hotspots, scientific output, and trendy topics. Bibliometric network analysis has been used before to analyze WLB research areas such as keywords co-occurrences, individual collaborations [72,93,94], and institutional collaborations [95]. However, our research is unique in its comprehensiveness as it includes conceptual, empirical, and review articles extracted from the Scopus database in indexed journals and traces the growth of conceptual and scientific content, methodological, cross-citation, and geographic atlas of the research landscape.

The source and author citations analysis highlight two journals: the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Vocational Behavior, as the leading publishing outlets, while the most frequently cited paper is Greenhaus et al. [75]. Another notable finding is the dominance of some authors as the lead in many collaborative publications. The most dominating authors were H Lingard from 2002 to 2015, S Lewis from 2001 to 2020, and R Baral from 2010 to 2020. However, a few newcomers, such as A Vasumathi (2015–2020) and S Pasamar (2013–2020) have also achieved some dominance in publications. The reasons for such a solo dominance are unclear and might be a promising avenue for future research on authorship dynamics within various fields.

Most of the WLB research originated in the USA, UK, and Australia. These countries play the leading role in changing workplace systems, and political and constitutional support is extended to safeguard employee and family well-being. Furthermore, international collaboration between researchers was limited to one and the same country. Only a few researchers at Australian and New Zealand universities collaborated with authors from the UK, New Zealand, India, and Europe, who collaborated on a national level or with neighboring countries. These findings indicate a lack of global collaboration between researchers due to differences in education, sociocultural systems, and policy [96]. Our findings align with previous bibliometric studies focusing on other research areas [71,72]. Fig. 11 shows that collaboration networks are sparse, while the most impactful research has become isolated “silos.” These findings are consistent with Vidgen et al. [85].

Several popular themes of WLB research emerged during the two decades under consideration. A few of them are increasing job insecurity [97], baby boomers’ effects on work systems advancement of technology [98], racism [99], sustainability and community development [100], and flexible work systems [43]. Moreover, new research themes have accommodated the increasing struggle to manage the demand for family and work; mainly, Black and Asian women suffered multiple effects due to racism and sexism at work [99]. Due to these underlying struggles of communities that pressured them to engage in social justice, trade unions also affected WLB research as critical themes (ibid). The research trends show that flexible working and gender and WLB of women have become a universal concept for all employees.

Despite having a long history beyond the 1900s, our study concludes that the WLB theory is still evolving. The research development witnessed slow growth and a narrow focus between 2000 and 2005, and the research scope was limited to keywords such as job design and equal opportunities. These findings are consistent with Liu et al.’s co-word analysis [48] and the core discussions found in Bello and Tanko's review of work-life balance theories [101]. In contrast, from 2006 onwards, there was a rising trend of research expanding previously unexplored content. These results are consistent with prior researchers' keywords denoting expanding WLB conceptual boundaries [48,101]. For example, keywords include role conflict, hours of work, quality of life, telework, gender, flexibility, and family life were the dominant themes until 2015. After 2015, the exponential trend is visible with emerging new research directions, and the focus seems to be moving beyond traditional WLB boundaries to more critical and rigorous issues arising such as work-life balance, job satisfaction, well-being, work-family conflicts, and turnover intentions.

The rapid growth of scientific content, volume, and the geography of WLB research from 2000 to 2020 demonstrate an increasing interest in the subject due to the changes in the workplace and work systems in addition to the influence of external factors such as social, economic, political, and legal courtesies affecting individual and family well-being, organizational growth, emerging global technological, economic, social and political trends, and sustainability perspectives. Moreover, the increasing number of women in the workforce influenced researchers to explore gender-related dimensions of WLB, as evidenced by the keyword analysis. Due to economic hardships and the convergence of gender roles, more and more women have entered the workforce, leading to the increase in dual-earner families, fueling the interest of WLB researchers to explore. Such changes in the political and social arenas motivated researchers to expand the theoretical boundaries to comprehend the necessity of WLB for organizations and individuals and for nations’ lawmaking. In addition to expanding the content, there is an increase in the methodological rigor of WLB research due to the volatile nature of external global environmental changes. The definition of WLB has also been altered and can be applied to infinite perspectives and frameworks since there is no universally accepted theory or a boundary of WLB [101].

5.2. Implications for practice and research

Mukherjee et al. [38] present a framework for the contributions expected to be derived from bibliometric analyses in research and practice. When it comes to research, the authors discuss the importance of a study identifying research gaps, future directions, and defining knowledge clusters. For practical implications, areas such as the objective assessments of productivity and impact, social dominance, and coverage are included. The findings of this research contribute to the increasing discourse of WLB theory and depict the growth of research interest beyond traditional lenses previously limited to organizational and individual productivity and individual and family well-being. The noteworthy growth of research between 2015 and 2020 witnessed a growing interest among scholars worldwide in applying WLB theory as a multidisciplinary and multifaceted construct that goes beyond traditional boundaries. Thus, our study demonstrates the potential to expand the WLB research into many unexplored concepts, disciplines, and target audiences.

The increasing trend of research shows a connection between management practices and employee turnover rates in different countries. WLB reduces turnover in the labor market because employees are in a far better position to manage demands on their flexible time, resulting in a noticeable improvement in their quality of living. Future research should focus on raising awareness of the benefits of adopting relevant policies to attract and retain a highly productive workforce for the betterment of the workplace [96]. Thus, new areas of WLB research can support employers in reducing the global skills gaps. In addition, the current trend of disruptive and sophisticated technologies changes every aspect of organizations and employees’ lives. Such dramatic shifts in work systems and patterns can affect balancing work-life and family and ensure employability. Therefore, there is a need for both qualitative and multi-variance analysis to understand what new competencies would support future workforce to adapt to technologized workplaces competently. Similarly, many potential aspects of WLB research can be explored in relation to advancing workplace technologies.

WLB research raises a voice for the voiceless to achieve basic living standards and maintain a minimum wage for minorities and disadvantaged parties [99]. The changes in the world economy and the increasing number of women in the workforce dramatically influenced traditional gender roles, and the upsurge of work preferences of females in many nations have been the main trendy topics [48]. Our study found that the most recent research focuses on human and social sustainability and social equity as emerging dimensions; thus, future research can explore the potential of expanding the boundaries of WLB from family and worktime and organizational productivity dimensions towards more societal development aspects [98,100,102].

The findings confirm a lack of international collaboration and comparative analysis to understand the implications of various policy measures and factors affecting WLB in different nations. Moreover, there is a gap in the literature related to legislative and legal aspects. Despite some legal protections for organizational and family levels, such as family and child well-being in the USA, there is a dearth of research in all other countries except Australia, the UK, and the USA. Our study illustrates a lack of research regarding the WLB policies in almost all developing nations that need more research. Thus, policymakers should be aware of this need to ensure the continuous and uninterrupted labor supply by reducing work-related barriers such as childbearing, the inability to accommodate trailing spouses, and the growing dissatisfaction of nonworking spouses worldwide. There are also issues of equity that hinder social engagement and fair distribution of the opportunity to use one's talent and skills, which requires societies to attenuate any effects of race, gender, and equality of processes at work and in society. People in the same situation should be treated equally and have the same chance to access resources. Likewise, many aspects of WLB research accommodate a variety of related equality aspects.

This seminal work provides a clear roadmap for future research to expand into new disciplinary boundaries and shed light on the potential of WLB to become a new essential management field because future trends are quite different from today's and yesterday's work environments. Our study illustrates that the WLB is an evolving universal phenomenon that can proliferate into various other theories (e.g., Boundary theory and Border theory) and integrate multiple dimensions of WLB into many different disciplines. For example, social, community, and future workforce development should benefit and prepare to sustain their work in the emerging global, technological, social, political, and economic trends [101].

5.3. Limitations and future research directions

This bibliometric study provides a holistic understanding of how the WLB concepts and applications evolved over a two-decade. However, the study has several limitations that future researchers may avert. Even though our study is the most comprehensive bibliometric analysis for the period spanning the first two decades of the new millennium, the scope of this study is limited to the five research questions specified in the introduction. The analysis is restricted to only 1190 peer-reviewed journal articles published from 2000 to 2020 and listed in the Scopus database. Other related documents such as books and book chapters, conference proceedings, and non-peer-reviewed articles not listed in Scopus may bring a new understanding of the WLB field.

The findings demonstrate that most research articles were published by authors residing mainly in the USA, UK, and Australia, while a few studies show collaboration between authors in more than one country. Though there is a lack of research to understand the reasons behind this isolation in research productivity, one can initiate new research to understand the driving forces of collaboration and solo country focus. In addition, our study illustrates a slow growth of WLB research in many other nations because three nations, the USA, the UK, and Australia, dominate, having a relatively higher number of publications. Hence, a global understanding of the consequences and differences of WLB practices and their implications is either discrete or unknown. Moreover, the findings depict a significant gap in collaborative research between developing and less developed countries that would benefit future researchers who initiate new research to bridge the disparities. Future research should better understand the peculiarities of WLB by focusing on regions with similar sociocultural commonalities.

There is also scope for exploring the potential for applying the WLB concept to create social sustainability, especially with the dramatic changes in work systems and how employees worked before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Future researchers can explore many aspects and domains of remote work and how family and work combination at home influences family and employment sustainability. Furthermore, researchers are urged to use our work to guide comparisons on how our understanding and applications of WLB have evolved post-pandemic. The current post-COVID-19 WLB literature might not be rich enough for a meaningful comparison. However, given the exponential rate of growth we have uncovered in recent years, this will surely change, giving way to riper ground for such investigations. Moreover, there is a vast potential for innovative research directions to accommodate recent changes to workplaces and balance home-office remote work. Similarly, with the current technological advances, many organizations have changed their traditional work systems and boundaries, creating boundaryless work systems where high-potential employees can remain at work due to their adaptability to multitasking work environments [103]. New research may focus on exploring how increasingly changing technology and boundaryless job responsibilities impact WLB at all levels: organizational, individual, and family sustainability.

The current study highlights the emerging trends and changing boundaries of the WLB landscape over two decades. Despite many reviews and a plethora of research that expands the conceptual boundaries horizontally and vertically, there is still a vast gap in WLB research that portrays the changing working, societal, and political trends. In sum, WLB is an instrumental theory that can resolve critical issues in many aspects at the individual, family, organizational, community, and national levels.

Funding statement

We would like to acknowledge Gulf University for Science and Technology for financially supporting the publication of this word.

Data availability statement

Data is currently being utilized in another research paper not related to this paper and will be made available on request.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Michel Zaitouni: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft. Gertrude Hewapathirana: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Conceptualization. Mohamed Mostafa: Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Raghid Al Hajj: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation, Methodology. Ahmed R. ElMelegy: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.