What do we want now or later? Work-family decisions in a dual-earner context.

Abstract

Dual-earner couples regularly make work-family decisions; i.e., decisions to deal with conflicts between work and family. Such decisions occur on a daily basis (e.g. when a family event interferes with a work deadline), but they can also relate to more long-term – or anchoring – choices about how to combine career and family plans (e.g. whether to work part-time, move elsewhere, …). Existing work-family research has mainly explored decision-making as a rather coherent and logical process. However, human choices are also characterized by automatic thinking processes, which are inherently prone to cognitive errors and can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In this theoretical paper, we argue that work-family conflict and dual-earner decision-making elicit specific conditions of uncertainty and complexity, making automatic thinking more likely. By drawing on behavioral decision-making literature, we develop several research propositions on how cognitive biases can impact short- and long-term decisions in a dual-earner context. We theorize that in the short run, individual partners tend to focus on avoiding immediate costs, choosing options that are not necessarily in line with couple commitments. For long-term decisions, partners may disproportionally focus on potential losses or coping challenges, thereby missing out on desirable work-family choices for the couple as a whole. Our propositions may guide work-family researchers to think about and include cognitive biases in their future studies.