The turnover of employees can create a serious problem for the development and prosperity of organizations. To control this situation organizations are adopting the emerging concept of work – life balance to satisfy and retain their valued employees. Work life balance considers attitude of employees towards their work and life affairs, so, good work life balance is the need of the current era [9]. Providing work life balance facility, allows employers to appear employee friendly. Currently the studies of job satisfaction and work – life balance go hand in hand. An Australian study revealed that, the thing that effected life, more than the working hours was job satisfaction and age. [9].

Work life balance are the employee feelings that they are freely able to use flexible work hours program to balance their work and other commitments like, family, hobbies, art, travelling, studies and so forth, instead of only focusing on work [14]. This shows that provision of good work – life balance leads to the activities that lead to satisfaction of employees and make them a good contributor in the organizational performance. Good work life balance is defined as a situation in which workers feel that they are capable of balancing their work and non – work commitments [20].

Improving the quality of work life balance facilities not only helps in improving the productivity but also helps in increasing employee loyalty and job satisfaction. According to Osterman, organizations introduce family friendly policies to respond to the practical problems associated with the recruitment and retention of the employees [21]. Healthy practices of work life balance leads to descending trends in job dissatisfaction and turnover.

The current study examines the relationship of work – life balance, job satisfaction and turnover intentions of MBBS qualified doctors working in hospitals in few major cities of Pakistan.

2. Literature Review

Organizations are striving for better performance to compete with their competitors. For this reason they are trying to retain their valued employees and are considering the issues relating to work and life. To take care of their employees organizations are facilitating the employee even at work to maximize the level of job satisfaction and to reduce turnover rate.

Job satisfaction can better be understood as the degree to which people like their jobs [27]. By looking at the definition of work – life balance Blunsdon, et al., stated that work-life balance means that an individual can manage both work and other aspects of their life, such as the domestic or family sphere, without a conflict or without the opposition of one domain to the other [4]. Turnover intention is defined as an employees decision to leave an organization voluntarily [6].

Job satisfaction and turnover intentions are the reflection of the viewpoint that employees have about their organizations in which they work. Employees generally show high levels of job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions, when their working environment helps them to satisfy their needs.

The researchers found that the work conditions were the most influential on the job satisfaction and turnover intentions of employees. The work conditions included were the non – monetary characteristics of their work mainly including good social relationships with their colleagues ad supervisors, promotion opportunities, professional development opportunities, and participatory management strategies [3, 10, 17, 33].

Intrusion of work into private life for doctors has substantially influenced the work related attitudes. Work life balance has important consequences for employee attitudes towards their organizations as well as for the lives of employees. The belief that organization cares about employee well being has a positive impact both for employee and the employers, that are employee satisfaction, and the organizational commitment and intention to remain with the organization [26].

The work and life are two separate domains in the management of the highly skilled workers for instance technical professionals, whose commitment may be a challenge to employer [7, 25]. Employer strategies of `respect’, as a part of family-friendly policies, have already been shown to have positive outcomes for the job satisfaction of technical workers [12], as well as for organizational commitment, turnover and absenteeism [8, 25]. On the other hand, negative spillover from work to non – work life, that is emotional exhaustion, has been shown to adversely affect organizations in the form of low commitment and high turnover [32].

Researchers also revealed that when work interfered with family life, it reduced the satisfaction from job and from life as a whole [1]. Workers with positive subjective experience of family and marital life were less likely to suffer mental health problems as a result of work-related stress, from a social policy perspective [19].

There is significant evidence that those working in construction industry were at risk of poor health and well-being due to long working hours, job insecurity, poor work–life balance, low professional worth and temporary teams [24], which result in low job satisfaction.

Guthrie revealed that skill – based pay plans, as a source of work – life balance facilities and job satisfaction, was a source of improving employee retention, where as group incentive plans, as a source of work – life balance facilities and job satisfaction, were found to be the source of employee turnover [15].

3. Methodology

Sample:

Sample constituted of 204 MBBS qualified doctors working in different public and private sector hospitals in the different cities of Pakistan. Total 500 questionnaires were distributed out of which 204 complete responses were achieved. The response rate of survey was 40.8%. A convenient sampling method was used to collect the responses.

Data collection/measures:

Questionnaires are widely used within work – related health and well-being literature [28], and are useful for measuring attitudes of individuals. So the adopted questionnaires, having proper validity and reliability, were used to gather responses form doctors to assess the relationship of the dependent and independent variables. The details of the instruments used for data collection is as under.

Work- Life Balance:

Work life balance was assessed on a scale having five items developed by Hill et al., [16]. Items were assessed on a five point Likert scale, 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree. The coefficient alpha calculated for the scale was α = 0.78, indicating high reliability.

Job satisfaction:

Job satisfaction was measured on a