Abstract
This study aims to examine how organizational and family factors protect employees from depressive symptoms induced by work-family conflict. With a cross-sectional design, a total of 2184 Chinese employees from 76 departments completed measures of work-family conflict, organizational justice, family flexibility, and depressive symptoms. The results showed that work-family conflict including work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict was positively associated with depressive symptoms. In cross-level analysis, organizational justice climate weakened the adverse effect of work-family conflict on depressive symptoms and the buffering effects of procedural and distributive justice climate in the association between work-family conflict and depressive symptoms depended on family flexibility. Specifically, compared with employees with high family flexibility, procedural and distributive justice climate had a stronger buffering effect for employees with low family flexibility. These results indicate that organization and family could compensate each other to mitigate the effect of work-family conflict on employees’ depressive symptoms. Cultivating justice climate in organization and enhancing family flexibility might be an effective way to reduce employees’ depressive symptoms.
Highlights
These results indicate that the buffering effects of procedural and distributive justice climate in the association between work-family conflict and depressive symptoms became stronger as family flexibility decreased, whereas the buffering effects of interpersonal and informational justice climate were not influenced by family flexibility
Procedural and distributive justice climate can buffer the negative effect of work-family conflict only for employees with low family flexibility but not for those with high family family conflict (WFC) and depressive symptoms was influenced by family flexibility
By including work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC) simultaneously, this study found that the conflict between work and family regardless of the directionality could induce employees’ depressive symptoms, which is consistent with most previous findings in Western culture
Summary
Work-Family Conflict and Depressive Symptoms among Chinese Employees. Work-family conflict is defined as “a form of interrole conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect” In China, with women’s entry into the workforce, the traditional gender roles of breadwinning men and homemaking women are changing. This civilian labor trend increases the likelihood that both men and women face simultaneous management of work and family issues across the life span [2]. Employees are facing problems of how to balance their work and family lives and suffer from work-family conflict, which may result in depressive symptoms.
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