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The demands of balancing work and family roles are associated with stress experiences. Stress increases if work impinges too far on what is required from one’s family while a balance between these demands tends to decreases stress. The purpose of this paper is to investigate resiliencefor the extent to which it can predict both work-family conflict (WFC) and balance (WFB). Moreover, cortisol levels will be used as a physiological indicator of stress.

Totally, 35 employed parents with children up to the age of six took part in the study. Salivary cortisol was collected three times a day.

Results show that cortisol levels are related to internal as well as external WFCs while WFB is not significantly linked with cortisol. Resilience has a beneficial influence on the mean cortisol level. Moreover, resilience is also advantageous for the work-family interplay, especially WFB.

The study concludes with suggestions for further research and advises that organizational and individual health promoting activities should seek to implement WFB as well as resilience strategies.

For the first time, the aim is to assess whether work-family interplay and resilience are associated with an objective biomarker of stress, namely cortisol.

Previous research on the work-family nexus has tended to concentrate on childcare responsibilities. This neglects consideration of an increasing population of employees who care for dependents such as elders, impaired partners or disabled children. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate organizational and personal resources as antecedents of work-family conflict (WFC) and irritation in a sample of employed family caregivers.

Data were collected from 508 employees within one organization who had informal family caregiving responsibilities.

The results indicate that a supportive work-family culture was an important resource for reducing WFC and health-related self-efficacy reduced irritation. In sum, when a company fosters a family-friendly culture that includes working in a constructive and understanding manner with employees who have informal family caregiver responsibilities, it becomes easier for the employees to integrate the demands of work and family demands. Moreover, health-related self-efficacy is an important resource that can improve stress and future researchers should give it greater consideration.

This study contributes to existing literature by the identification of personal and organizational resources of informal family caregivers with the aim to reduce their stress experiences.