The work–family interface in Korea: can family life enrich work life?

Abstract

Using data obtained from 363 Korean civil servants, we examine the mechanism of family-to-work enrichment. Although individualistic Western work–family literature predicts that resources from the family role, both instrumental and affective, will improve the work role by mitigating the negative job stress–job satisfaction relationship, data from collectivistic Korean society show an unexpected opposite effect – an accentuating, not a mitigating moderating effect. Family resources – especially affective resources – may function as an additional work stressor rather than enrich the work role under collectivists' weak identity separation between work and family roles. This study thus reveals the cultural biases in the extant Western work–family literature by showing that the cultural variance in role identity separation/integration may underlie the mechanism of family-to-work enrichment.

Keywords:

• family-to-work enrichment
• individualism–collectivism
• Korea
• role identity separation/integration

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Lotte Bailyn, M. Diane Burton, Emilio J. Castilla, Thomas A. Kochan, and the attendants in the Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) seminar at MIT Sloan School of Management and in the Academy of Management Annual Meeting for their helpful comments and guidance with this paper.

Notes

1. We also tried testing the hypotheses with the sample of married people with no children, but the sample size is too small (N = 25) and the F-statistics are not significant.

2. As suggested by Aiken and West (1991), in the fifth step for the three-way interaction, other two-way interaction terms – ‘job stress × male’ and ‘instrumental (or affective) resources × male’ – were also included.

3. This observation is also evidenced by the stronger main effect of instrumental transfer that contributes to increasing job satisfaction than that of affective transfer [compare Model 2 (significant main effect of instrumental transfer) and Model 5 (insignificant main effect of affective transfer) in Table 2].