Abstract
This paper aims to verify the effects of work–family conflict and work–family facilitation on employee innovation in the digital era. Based on resource conservation theory, this study regards the work–family relationship as a conditional resource. Employees who are in a state of lack of resources caused by work–family conflict will maintain existing resources by avoiding the consumption of further resources to perform innovation activities; employees who are in a state of sufficient resources are more willing to invest existing resources to obtain more resources. In this study, 405 employees from enterprises in the Chinese provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Sichuan, and Guangdong, and in the municipality of Tianjin were selected as the research object. These enterprises are knowledge-based companies, and their employees frequently transfer knowledge at work. We collected questionnaires from the frontline employees of these companies. The results show that negative and positive emotions mediate the effect of work–family conflict and work–family facilitation on employee innovation. Moreover, work flexibility has a significant moderating effect on the mediating role of emotions between work–family facilitation and employee innovation behavior. In the digital era, when facing different work–family situations, employees need to pay attention to and dredge their negative emotions to avoid reducing their innovative behaviors due to self-abandonment; in parallel, they need to guide their positive emotions toward innovation, so as to promote their innovative consciousness and behavior. This paper expands the research perspective of employee innovation behavior.
Highlights
New technologies such as Tencent meeting have popularized social media and offered new models of communication and collaboration within and between organizations (Barker, 2010)
This study provides a new perspective for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between work–family conflict/work–family facilitation and employee innovation behavior, as well as a useful reference for enterprises to intervene in employee innovation behavior from the perspective of work–family integrated management
We argue that work–family conflict is a state of conditional resource loss, in which employees will take actions to avoid the further loss of existing surplus resources
Summary
New technologies such as Tencent meeting have popularized social media and offered new models of communication and collaboration within and between organizations (Barker, 2010). Employees can deliberately choose where and when they want to work: at the traditional office, at home, or practically anywhere else, anytime. Work Family State and Innovation new fashion. New technology facilitates an ability to work late at home that is a double-edged sword (Dockery and Bawa, 2018). It provides flexibility and permeability, which can be useful to accommodate work and family demands. On the other hand, increased availability for work can increase workload and encroach upon family time (Allen et al, 2014; Barber and Santuzzi, 2014; Harris et al, 2015; Derks et al, 2016; Gadeyne et al, 2018; Ma and Turel, 2019; Yang et al, 2019)
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