Ranking work–family conflict management strategies through a novel multi-criteria decision-making model

Work family conflict has become a critical organizational problem as increasing job demands and changing work structures intensify the pressure on employees' personal lives. The core challenge in this context is determining which organizational strategies should be prioritized to effectively reduce stress and role incompatibility under limited resources. Although numerous studies discuss work family conflict, the literature lacks systematic and quantitative frameworks that simultaneously evaluate multiple criteria and rank alternative strategies under uncertainty. The primary objective of this study is to address this gap by proposing an integrated decision-making model to prioritize strategies for minimizing work family conflict. The proposed model combines distance-based experts' weighting to differentiate expert importance, the logarithmic percentage change-driven objective weighting (LOPCOW) method to objectively determine criteria weights, the multi-normalization-based ranking analysis (MUNRA) approach to rank strategic alternatives, and Fermatean fuzzy sets (FFSs) to capture ambiguity in expert judgments. By doing so, the study provides a structured and realistic analytical framework. The findings reveal that effectiveness of stress reduction is the most critical evaluation criterion, while workload and task design optimization emerge as the most appropriate strategy. The robustness analyses confirm the stability of the results. This study contributes to the literature by introducing a novel hybrid model and offering evidence-based insights for managers. The results suggest that organizations should prioritize strategies focusing on workload balance, stress reduction, and supportive job design to achieve sustainable work family harmony.