Employee-Spouse Perceptual Congruence in Employee Work-to-Family Enrichment Affects Family and Work Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Relationship Conflict.

Jianlan Chen,Yu Tian

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.660987

Abstract

Various studies have demonstrated that work-to-family enrichment (WFE) benefits employees in both the work and home domains. However, these findings may overstate the benefits of WFE and ignore its potential dark side. We advance the research on WFE by integrating conflict theory into the concept of WFE to investigate whether and how employee–spouse perceptual congruence in employee WFE influences employee family cohesion and emotional exhaustion. The results of polynomial regressions on 225 employee and spouse dyads revealed that the perceptual congruence in employee WFE between employees and spouses was negatively associated with relationship conflict. Additionally, asymmetrical incongruence effects were found, wherein spouses perceived a higher relationship conflict with employees when their perceptions of employee WFE were lower than those of the employees. Furthermore, spouses' perceived relationship conflict with employees mediated the influences of employee–spouse perceptual congruence in employee WFE on employee family cohesion and emotional exhaustion.

Highlights

With the development of both the positive psychology movement (Seligman, 2002) and the positive organizational behavior movement (Luthans, 2002), positive relationships between work and family roles have attracted the interest of researchers
We further propose that a higher spousal perception of relationship conflict with employees induced by dyadic perceptual incongruence in work-to-family enrichment (WFE), in turn, influences two main family and work consequences—family cohesion and emotional exhaustion
Using the conflict theory tenet that real or perceived differences between individuals will result in relationship conflict (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003; De Dreu, 2008), we propose that dyadic perceptual incongruence in the WFE of employees will result in a worse relationship between spouses

Summary

Introduction

With the development of both the positive psychology movement (Seligman, 2002) and the positive organizational behavior movement (Luthans, 2002), positive relationships between work and family roles have attracted the interest of researchers. Work-to-family enrichment (WFE) describes the positive relationships between work and family roles and is defined as the extent to which experiences in work roles improve the quality of life in family roles (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006). Under this definition, a wide body of evidence from numerous studies indicates that high WFE levels have positive family and work effects, including higher family and job satisfaction, higher family functioning, and higher job performance (Mcnall et al, 2010; Carlson et al, 2011, 2019; Oren and Levin, 2017; Wayne et al, 2017, 2020; Zhang et al, 2018; Kalliath et al, 2020; Wu et al, 2020). This kind of perceptual difference will result in relationship conflicts between employees and their family members and lead to negative family and work effects according to conflict theory (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003; De Dreu, 2008)

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Conclusion