Institutional pressures and internal motivations of work-life balance organizational arrangements in Italy

Drawing upon institutional and organisational culture theories, the present work explores organizational commitment to work-life balance practices, thus proposing an original contribution within the field. Indeed, literature on work-life balance is still limited and, among existing studies, few have analysed the relationships with external social pressure (institutional) and internal motivations (organizational values and increase of productivity).rnThe analyses takes into consideration a sample of 107 organisations nearly equally split among profit, non-profit and public sectors in the Italian national context, which represent a well-known model of welfare state. Findings confirm that differences among the three sectors exist in terms of the rationales and the commitment to WLB policies and practices due to different institutional context and organizational cultures.