Decision Latitude, Psychological Job Demands and Work-Life Imbalance — A Study among Software Professionals

The sunshine sector of the Indian economy — the Information Technology (IT) sector has been beneficial to the country in many aspects. It has not only helped India gain a prominent place in the global business scenario, it has also provided enormous employment opportunities with international exposure to the youth of India, given handsome pay-checks, fetched foreign exchange and above all redefined the concept of work. However, not everything is smooth sailing for these knowledge workers. Work-life balance is a growing concern for this genre of employees. In the light of the changing paradigms of work, a study was carried out among software professionals to seek answers to the following research questions: (i) What is the extent of work-life imbalance experienced by the software professionals? (ii) What is the relationship between the socio-demographic variables, job correlates (namely decision latitude and psychological job demands) and work-life imbalance of the respondents? Descriptive research design was used for this study. The study was conducted among 90 software professionals, in Chennai. The respondents were chosen randomly from leading IT companies in Chennai. The main source of data for the study was the primary sources i.e., the respondents themselves. The results of this empirical study portray the extent of work-life imbalance among other key findings of the software engineers in the city of Chennai.