AbstractsPsychology

Consequences of Work–Family Conflict

by Christoph Nohe




Institution: Universität Heidelberg
Department: The Faculty of Behavioural and Cultural Studies
Degree: PhD
Year: 2014
Record ID: 1099873
Full text PDF: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/16845


Abstract

Most employees are challenged to combine work and family roles. Although both roles can provide self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and happiness, they can also interfere with each other making it more difficult to fulfill work and family demands. Work–family conflict is the construct that captures interference between work and family roles. High work–family conflict has been associated with potential consequences such as low health, high turnover intentions, and low job performance. My main aim in this dissertation is to extend research on work–family conflict and potential consequences. To this end, I conducted three empirical studies. Study 1 examined the relationship between work–family conflict and strain, an umbrella term for constructs such as exhaustion, depression, and somatic symptoms. Specifically, my coauthors and I tried to work toward resolving two debates. The first debate is about the direction of relationships between work–family conflict and strain. We examined whether work–family conflict predicts strain, whether strain predicts work–family conflict, or whether work–family conflict and strain reciprocally predict each other. The second debate is about the pattern of relationships between work–family conflict and domain-specific outcomes. The currently dominant cross-domain perspective suggests that family-to-work conflict (FWC) is mainly related to work-related strain. The less-popular matching perspective, however, suggests that work-to-family conflict (WFC) is mainly related to work-related strain. To address those two debates, we applied meta-analytic path analysis to 33 panel studies (total N = 13,029) that had repeatedly measured work–family conflict and strain. For the direction of relationship, results showed reciprocal relationships for both forms of work–family conflict and strain. More specifically, WFC predicted strain (β = .08) and strain predicted WFC (β = .08). Similarly, FWC predicted strain (β = .03) and strain predicted FWC (β = .05). These findings held for both men and women and for different time lags between the two measurement waves. For the debate on matching versus cross-domain relationships, results showed that WFC had a stronger relationship with work-specific strain than did FWC, supporting the matching hypothesis. Study 2 focused on work–family conflict and turnover intentions. More specifically, it compared two theoretical perspectives that make competing predictions about the relationships between work–family conflict and domain-specific outcomes. The cross-domain perspective predicts that FWC should be more important than WFC in predicting increases in turnover intentions. The matching perspective, however, predicts that WFC should be more important than FWC in predicting increased turnover intentions. We expanded the debate about matching versus cross-domain relationships by testing whether work-family specific social support should stem from the same domain as the conflict as the matching principle would indicate or from the other domain as the cross-domain…