Job Stress, Relationship Effects

Theoretical Approaches

There is abundant evidence that chronic job stress (including interpersonal conflict at work) is related to poorer physical and mental well-being. Since 1980, researchers have paid increasing attention to how the contagion of stress from the workplace to personal relationships may reduce well-being. Stress contagion from the job to other settings is generally classified into two types: spillover and crossover. Work spillover is defined as job stress that crosses the boundary from work into another area of life. Spillover can be either behavioral (paying less attention to a spouse or child) or affective (feeling more impatient with them). Crossover occurs when stressors experienced on the job have an impact on the behavior or mood of a significant other person, such as a spouse or child.

Researchers from many disciplines have contributed to the study of work spillover and crossover. For example, social and gender role theories in sociology have long influenced research on the relationship effects of job stress. Psychological and organizational research on spillover has applied the sociological definition of social role, which is the set of normative expectations for behavior in an important domain of life. Gender roles are defined as expectations for appropriate masculine and feminine behavior. From these definitions of social and gender roles emerged the ideas that conflict can develop between job duties and family relationships, and that women are more likely to experience significant relationship effects from job stress because of social expectations that women rear children and defer their own careers to accommodate their husbands.

Studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, when fewer mothers participated in the paid labor force, started with the premise that work-family conflict was primarily a problem for working mothers. Changes in women's employment patterns, however, have led to shifts in both the definition of work-family conflict and in the focus of research. The majority of married women in the United States and other developed nations now are cobread-winners for their households, and their contributions have helped raise family living standards. Research has also established that men are contributing more time to household work and to child care. A more contemporary view of work-family conflict is that it is experienced when household breadwinners do not have enough time to fulfill their joint work and family commitments. Work-family conflict is viewed as the result of having too few hours in the day. This evolving view about the cause of work-family conflict also strongly suggests that men as well as women experience its effects.

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