Impacts of Career and Family Roles on Women's Leadership Aspiration

Today، men and women equally plan for their career and family roles. However، males’ career development is less affected by their multi roles in comparison to females that face more work –family conflict. Many scholars in the area of career development have sought for a comprehensive theory to help better understanding of critical aspects of career and the impacts received from other lifelong multiple roles of individual employees. Majority of existing theories are devoted to female’s career development، mainly because they need to manage their different and inconsistent tasks to reach a balance among their multiple roles as employee، wife، and mother. Findings of this survey research that was carried out among a sample of female academics in top Ten Iranian Universities، shows that in comparison to the priority of family roles، female academics’ priority for their roles in work place is relatively low. Moreover، their perception from work-family conflict in case of engagement in managerial responsibility is relatively high while the feeling of self efficacy to manage such conflict appears to be at a low level. Test of hypothesis indicated that work-family conflict management self efficacy has a significant negative effect on perceived work-family conflict which in turn has a negative impact on females Leadership aspiration. Moreover، career role salience showed to have a positive impact on Leadership aspiration، that in turn affected by moderating effect of family role salience. The result implies that relationship between career role salience and Leadership aspiration appears to be weaker among female academics having high family role salience. Results of our research reveals that in respect to the impact of females’ multi roles on their managerial aspirations emphasize on organizational barriers and ignorance of the impact of females family roles’ choices between family and carrier، lacks a comprehensive vision، hence requires more attention in future research.