Work-family Spillover

Effects of Job Characteristics and Work-Related Experiences on Family Relationships

Studies of job conditions and job characteristics now commonly include subjective appraisals of work to understand how individuals experiences or views of their jobs might bring about changes in family dynamics. Job satisfaction is one of the chief features of work life that is studied. In general, parents who are more satisfied with their careers show greater warmth and responsiveness to their children and report greater marital satisfaction. Workers who experience more autonomy and complexity on the job also display more positive parenting and less harsh and restrictive parenting. Characteristics that select individuals into jobs with certain degrees of complexity and autonomy—educational level for instance—may also help shape parenting behavior. Researchers rely on longitudinal designs, with the same group of participants followed for months or years, to tease apart the impact that jobs have on parenting from the influence of factors that underlie both. The evidence from the longitudinal studies indicates that jobs can serve as an arena outside the household where workers may experience achievement and fulfillment that can carry over into the family with positive implications for those relationships.

Research also consistently indicates that chronic job stress affects family relationships through a negative impact on individual well-being. For example, the subjective experience of job stress has been associated with self-reports of personal distress, such as depression, that have then been linked to poorer marital and parent-child relations. In the absence of individual distress as an intervening link, however, there is no connection between chronic job stressors and family outcomes.

One facet of job stress is the social climate or quality of social relationships at work. Parents who experience a noncohesive or conflictive work atmosphere seem to have more negative interactions with their children (e.g., they are less affectionate, more angry), with longitudinal studies suggesting that these effects may hold up for months. Similarly, couples who report negative and unsupportive relationships at work also experience more marital tension and arguments. Social support in the workplace has been linked with greater individual health and well-being; these links are thought to have positive implications for family life. However, because investigators have tended to focus on the impact of a negative work atmosphere, there is not as much evidence that supportive relationships at work benefit family social life.

Another aspect of job stress is time pressure and work overload, which can lead to parents feeling overwhelmed by and conflicted about their work and family roles. Similar to the association between the social atmosphere at work and family relations, studies reliably show that overloaded parents have poorer relations with their children (e.g., more conflict, less acceptance). In addition, more time pressure at work has been connected to reduced parental monitoring, meaning less knowledge about childrens activities and whereabouts, and less allocation of time to parenting. For couples, time pressure and work overload are associated with greater marital tension and poorer marital adjustment. Overall, the subjective appraisal of job demands as being stressful or overwhelming seems to have a greater influence on family interactions and relationships than do the objective job conditions.

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