Toward understanding employee reluctance to participate in family-friendly programs

Despite the fact that many organizations have implemented family-friendly programs to meet the needs of today's diverse workforce, employees have been reluctant to use them. Drawing on the theories of planned behavior, help-seeking, and distributive justice, we propose a framework that focuses initially on the more proximal factors that influence an employee's likelihood of participating in such programs. We then examine the role of organization-based situational characteristics in shaping both personal and normative assessments and describe the implications of our framework for researchers and practitioners.