Subjects: Psychology >> Management Psychology submitted time 2024-06-05
Abstract： Family and work are essential domains of most adults’ daily lives in the modern era. Family-work conflict is “a form of inter-role conflict in which role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respects.” Although the negative consequences of family-work conflict have featured prominently in the literature, scholars have insinuated that it may yield positive work behaviors. However, there is little empirical evidence demonstrating the positive results of family-work conflicts and the mechanisms for such functional consequences. To address this theoretical gap, we drew upon the identity maintenance perspective and hypothesized that employees who experience family-work conflict perceive a loss of job performance and desire to maintain work identity, which, in turn, facilitates employees’ work effort and considers reducing family hours.
We conducted three studies to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, a recall experiment was conducted to test the causal effect between family-work conflict and perceived job-performance loss. We recruited 200 participants through Credamo platform. Family-work conflict was manipulated by asking participants to recall their experiences. The results support the causal relationship between family-work conflict and perceived job-performance loss. In Study 2, we confirmed the conclusion through a between-participant scenario experiment. We recruited 232 full-time employees from southern China. When the test was administered, the participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions: a high family-work conflict (N = 120) and a low family-work conflict (N = 112). Subsequently, the participants were required to read and describe the scenario and its content, respectively. They then completed the manipulation check of family-work conflict, reported their perceived job-performance loss and work-effort intention, and considered reducing family conflict. In Study 3, we conducted a multi-wave field study with 786 dyadic data points from 100 employees. At Time 1, the employees were asked to report their demographic information. At Time 2, the employees completed three reports daily for 10 consecutive days. In the first report, the employees rated their affectivity, overnight sleep quality, and family-work conflict. The second and third reports focused on perceived job-performance loss, work effort, and reducing family hours.
Confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, bootstrapping, and Monte Carlo methods were used for data analysis. The results showed that family-work conflict was positively associated with perceived job-performance loss. Employees’ perceived job-performance loss increases their work efforts and reduces family hours. Gender also moderated the positive effects between family-work conflict and perceived job-performance loss; this relationship was stronger for male employees. Furthermore, family-work conflict has a conditional, positive indirect effect on work effort and considers reduced family hours through perceived job-performance loss, such that the indirect effects are stronger for male employees than for female employees.
This study extends the theory and research on family-work conflict in three ways. First, we complement and extend the family-work conflict research by revealing the positive effects of family-work conflict on employee work behaviors. The existing literature generally emphasizes that family-work conflict is detrimental to work. This study challenged conventional wisdom and provided a more balanced and dialectical understanding of the relationship between family-work conflict and work behavior. Second, we enrich the empirical research on the conditional effect of identity maintenance by providing evidence that gender is a significant factor influencing the process of identity maintenance. Third, we draw upon identity maintenance theory to explore the mechanism of family-work conflict to stimulate employees’ identity maintenance process. We further revealed a new explanatory mechanism of the relationship between employees’ family-work conflict and behavioral outcomes.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) are exposed to more stressful events but have less coping resources compared to those on higher ranks. They are hence more prone to a variety of diseases from the fetus to the elderly. Allostatic load (AL) provides an effective index to such cumulative effect of chronic stress on interconnected biological systems. Research revealed that AL is sensitive to changes in SES. The moderating and mediating factors between SES and AL include environmental risks, social support, psychological characteristics and life style. We propose that investigations on AL may shed light into understanding and intervention of disadvantaged populations in China.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Feeling trusted by supervisors is not only beneficial for employees’ job attitude and performance, but also for organizational effectiveness. Feeling ability-distrusted, defined as “the extent to which a subordinate perceives that their leader evaluates their ability to be untrustworthy”, is a crucial part of trust research. Previous research has revealed that feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors is detrimental to employees’ self-concept. Nevertheless, this prevailing assumption leaves our understandings of trust incomplete. Traditional Chinese management practice (e.g., “Jijiangfa”) has suggested that supervisors’ distrust may encourage employees to exhibit their better self. However, limited attention has been paid to the potential positive influence of employees' feeling ability- distrusted by their supervisors on their self-concept. For example, when employees perceive ability-distrust from their supervisors, they may lose their confidence in their abilities, or, on the other hand, may be motivated to prove their abilities. Thus, an important question is: Does feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors have both positive and negative effects on subordinates’ self-concept, and if so, why? To address this question, drawing from self-evaluation and psychological reactant theories, we examine the effects of feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors on employees’ job self-efficacy and desire to prove their abilities, which in turn influence employee work effort and job performance. Furthermore, we examine the moderating effect of perceived supervisor competence on the relationship between feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors and employees’ job self-efficacy or employees’ desire to prove their abilities. We conducted one experiment and two multi-wave field studies to test our hypothesis. In Study 1, we designed a 2 × 2 experiment, with 4 different scenarios. The scenarios described the interaction at work between a fictional employee named Wang Chen and his supervisor. We recruited 164 undergraduates from a university and assigned participants randomly to each of the scenarios. Each participant read the scenario and took on the role of Wang Chen. Next, participants reported their job self-efficacy, desire to prove their abilities, manipulation check, and demographics. In Study 2, we initially recruited 227 employees and their immediate supervisors from an insurance company in southern China. Employees were asked to report on their feeling ability-distrusted by their supervisors, job self-efficacy, desire to prove abilities, work effort, perceived supervisor competence, and demographics. One week later, supervisors were asked to report their subordinates’ job performance. Before responding to the surveys, participants were informed that the survey data would be confidential and only used for academic research., There were 195 pairs of matched and usable data for our final sample. In Study 3, we surveyed 266 employees and their supervisors across 65 workgroups. The employees reported on feelings of ability-distrust by their supervisors, perceived supervisor competence, and their demographics. One month later, employees were required to assess self-efficacy on the job, desire to prove their abilities and work effort. Supervisors were then invited to rate employees’ job performance. Results showed that when perceived supervisor competence was high, feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors was negatively associated with job self-efficacy, which in turn, decreased employee work effort and task performance. On the other hand, when perceived supervisor competence was low, feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors was positively associated with employee’s desire to prove their abilities, which in turn increased employee work effort and task performance. This study makes several theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on trust by challenging the consensus that feeling ability-distrusted by supervisors is unequivocally detrimental to employees’ self- concept. Second, we contribute by identifying an important boundary condition for the effects of feeling ability- distrusted by supervisors. From the perspective of perceived credibility of evaluation information, we found that perceived supervisor competence moderated the effects of feeling ability distrusted. Finally, we contribute to the literature on work effort by identifying an important but neglected antecedent of employee work effort. We suggest that beyond leaders’ positive behavior, their negative behaviors (e.g., expressed distrust) may also lead to employees’ increased work effort when employees perceive supervisor competence to be low.
Subjects: Psychology >> Management Psychology submitted time 2021-08-13
Abstract： "
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