The influence of employees’ work-to-family experiences on their spouses’ intentions to provide social support

ABSTRACT

According to the conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory, this paper explores how job incumbents’ work-to-family conflict and enrichment influence their spouses’ satisfaction with their work-family balance, which in turn impacts their spouses’ intentions to provide social support for the job incumbents’ work issues. We employed a mixed-method design. Study 1 involved a field study of a paired sample of 171 job incumbents and their spouses. Study 2 involved a scenario-based experiment (N = 274). The results showed that the relationship between job incumbents’ WFC and their spouses’ intentions to provide social support was mediated by the spouses’ satisfaction with the focal job incumbents’ WFB. We also found that job incumbents’ WFC interacts with WFE to influence their spouses’ intentions to provide social support via their spouses’ satisfaction with their WFB. This study offers new insights into the relationship between work-family experiences and social support.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-to-family conflict
• work-to-family enrichment
• work-family balance
• social support

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest with the work submitted.

Notes

1 The original support measure reported by King et al. (1995) includes 44 items. We selected eight items meeting the following criteria. First, these items show high item-total correlations in King et al.’s (1995) study. Second, the items have a behavioral orientation. Third, the items are readily understood when translated into Chinese.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72002012 and 71672099].

Notes on contributors

Niannian Dong

Niannian Dong is an assistant professor in the School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing. She received her Ph.D. in Management from Tsinghua University. Her research interest lies in work-family experiences and employee creativity.

Mian Zhang

Mian Zhang is an associate professor in the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Management from Xi’an Jiaotong University. His research interest includes work-family interactions and human resource management.

Xiaoye Wang

Xiaoye Wang is an associate professor in the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. She received her Ph.D. in Management from Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Her research focuses on creativity and innovation, social cognition and decision-making.