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 >> Management Psychology submitted time 2021-08-13
Abstract： "
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