Abstract
With the rapid growth of China's economy, work-family conflict (WFC) level of Chinese employees might have changed over time. The present research performed a cross-temporal meta-analysis of 71 papers using the Work-Family Conflict Scale (WFCS) from three Chinese academic databases and three databases in English to investigate changes in Chinese employees' WFC (N = 23,635) during 2005–2016. Results showed that the WFC level of employees increased significantly by 0.77 standard deviations over the past 12 years. The increasing trend over time occurred among both male and female employees, which is slightly more salient among male employees. However, there was no significant gender difference in WFC scores. This study found that the increase in WFC scores among Chinese employees was associated with scores of six social indicators that might cause stress in workplace (the number of employees and number of college graduates) and stress in family (divorce rate, residents' consumption level, elderly dependency ratio, and family size) of 5 years before and the year of data collection, which indicates that social changes played an important role in changes of WFC. The explanations and implications of these changes are discussed.
Highlights
People in modern societies are faced with difficulties in balancing weight of their work and family, which has been considered as a broader social phenomenon and as a notable psychological one (Saucan et al, 2015)
The Work-Family Conflict Scale (WFCS) consists of 18 items describing subjective feelings of work-family conflict (WFC) in two domains: (1) work interfering family (WIF, e.g., “I can not carry out some ordinary family activities due to the influence of work.”), reflecting that work can interfere with the ability to meet family demands; (2) family interfering work (FIW, e.g., “Family life brings me anxiety and has an impact on my usual work performance.”), reflecting that family can interfere with the ability to meet work demands (Bian et al, 2017; Ding et al, 2017; French et al, 2018)
We performed a cross-temporal meta-analysis of 71 studies to investigate changes in levels of WFC of Chinese employees during 2005–2016
Summary
People in modern societies are faced with difficulties in balancing weight of their work and family, which has been considered as a broader social phenomenon and as a notable psychological one (Saucan et al, 2015). A large body of previous studies adopting the scale that measures WFC among Chinese employees across different birth cohorts has been published in different years (e.g., Gan, 2007; Chen et al, 2010; Li, 2012; Hao et al, 2017), which makes it rather convenient to investigate how WFC scores on the scale have changed over time by using a cross-temporal meta-analysis. We would hypothesize that changes in stress both from work and from family that are associated with the corresponding social indicators might be responsible for the increase WFC level for Chinese employees To test these hypotheses, the cross-temporal meta-analysis was performed to investigate the changes in WFC among Chinese employees. We performed the crosstemporal meta-analysis to investigate the changes in WFC for male and female employees, and conducted a general metaanalysis to explore whether there was gender difference in WFC
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