It has long been known/assumed that long work hours endured over time puts a strain on family and marital life. A data set offered for this report seems to confirm that as there is a clear trend of execs with over 10 years of service for a given firm being divorced while those that are at or less than 10 years are still married.
Executive Tenure/Divorce
The author of this response is asked to analyze the tenure and divorce happenstance for eight executives and draw any relevant conclusions about the data and its patterns. The author is asked to ask about the correlation or even causality between tenure as an executive and divorce. The correlation is to be defined in terms of magnitude, direction and practical importance. The question of how much of whether executives have been divorced can be accounted for by the length of their tenure is posed as well as how much of tenure can be explained by whether there has been a divorce.
Formulas & Analysis of Data
In looking at the data, it is not hard to see that executives with tenure have a higher prevalence of divorce than those that do not. For example, of the five executives with over 10 years of service, only one is not divorced. None of the executives below 10 years, three in total are divorced as of yet but it is notable that they are very close to the 10-year mark themselves with all three of them being within a year of the ten-year mark.
Put another way, the average age of people that are divorced is 10.6875 years (11 + 11.5 + 10 + 10.25 = 42.75 / 4 = 10.6875) whereas the average age of those not divorced is 9.5625 (9 + 9.5 + 9.75 + 10 = 38.25 / 4 = 9.5625). On both of those calculations, the four tenure amounts for each group are added together and then divided by the number of data points in the group (four) to get the average for each group of four (MathIsFun.com, 2013). As for what is the best procedure to measure divorce, the above use of averages is probably the best and most appropriate since there are only 8 values and the divorce/non-divorce ratio is 1:1 in nature (MathIsFun.com, 2013).
It is also clear, really without doing ANY math, that people with higher tenure are clearly more likely to be divorced than people that are a bit lower but it is notable that the spread between the former and the latter is not all that wide. It stands to reason that the four non-divorced people will soon be divorced within the next year or two across the board as there is not a single person with 10.25 years or more tenure that is not yet divorced at this point. The highest person that is not divorced is only 3 months behind the first person that is divorced.
In terms of magnitude, the amount of years that tends to speak of divorce and that of non-divorce, at least in this data set, is rather narrow. In terms of practical importance, it is fairly clear a decade is pretty much the ostensible breaking point for this data set but that certainly may not apply for other companies and/or other situations. In terms of direction, it is clear that executives that approach a decade of service are at an extremely high risk (although not a certainty) of getting divorced. There was one outlier in this data set and it could certainly happen again.
It is clear, at least from this data set, that if an executive has more than a decade of service it is extremely likely that they are divorced although it is not a certainty. This assumption is qualitative in nature but it sort of has to be because tenure and divorce are not two things that can be clearly linked in a definitive fashion. Even so, the fact that executives surely work long hours and they do so year in and year out probably burns out the marriage over time and the usual breaking point is on or before the 10-year mark. It is hard to know that for sure given that the actual divorce points relative to tenure are not described, but the author of this report thinks it highly likely that the ongoing and perpetual nature of the work burns out the marriage over time and that is why most executives are divorced by their 10-year anniversary (Kleiman, 2000).
As for how the divorce may cause tenure (the inverse), it is likely that a divorced executive would spend more time working since their home commitments would shrink greatly, although that depends on the number of children (if any) involved, but not having a wife to come home to would make it less likely that an executive would be itching to leave the office, all things considered. It is hard to draw too many hard conclusions here since everyone's family and marriage dynamic is different as is their attitude about their job but it stands to reason that an executive would work a lot of hours every week and that would tend to harm a marriage more than it helps it. This is why conclusions can be drawn about divorce and tenure as an executive and how they are related.
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