engleski

Some personal, work, and family characteristics distinguishing spouses with both lower or higher levels of work-to-family conflict

The ''Spillover-Crossover model'' (Bakker & Demerouti, 2012) integrates two mechanisms of transfer of well-being. Spillover processes refer to the processes of intraindividual transfer of stress, affect, and energy from one domain to another domain in an individual's life. Crossover processes refer to processes of interindividual transmission of stress, affect, and energy. It is used in psychological research to investigate the impact of the work domain on the family domain and then the transfer of work-related emotions to other members of the household (especially the spouse). If work-family conflict could be viewed as the absence of work-family balance, which is defined as the ''accomplishment of role-related expectations that are negotiated and shared between an individual and his or her role-related partners in the work and family domains'' (Grzywacz & Carlson, 2007 ; p- 458), it is interesting to see the factors differentiating spouses who manage to achieve such balance or do not. The aim of this study was to determine personal, work, and family characteristics (shown in previous research as predictors of work-family conflict) which may distinguish spouses who both perceive either lower or higher levels of work-to-family conflict. The 350 couples participating in the study were full-time employed dual-earner spouses with at least one child living with them. They both filled the same set of self-assessment questionnaires, that is, they reported their age, education level, number and minimum age of children, total household income, their level of striving for achievement (through power and competition), perceived levels of work control and difficulty (workload), of social support at work and in the family from various sources (supervisor, colleagues, spouses, and other family members and close people), of the quality of family functioning (family competence and conflict), symptoms of stress experienced in the last six months and work-to-family conflict. They were categorized according to the median of the results on the six-item subscale measuring work-to-family conflict (Netemeyer, Boles, & McMurrian, 1996 ; Šimunić, Proroković, & Ivanov, 2014) and two groups of spouses were left in the further analyses: 1) those who both perceive lower levels of work-to-family conflict (N=104) and 2) those who both perceive higher levels of work-to-family conflict (N=117). Discriminant forward step-wise and canonical analysis with the categories of spouses as the dependent variable showed that the spouses with lower levels of work-to-family conflict, in comparison to those with higher levels of it, are more likely to have a lower household income, where the male spouse perceives less family conflict, has a lower workload, higher control at work, and less symptoms of stress and the female spouse is younger, has less workload and perceives higher levels of social support from their spouse and colleagues. Suggestion for future research would be to take into account more structural characteristics of the domains and more different personal traits, along with using more objective assessments, for instance, spouses assessing one another instead of only themselves.

Personal traits ; Work and Family (General) ; Dual-earner ; Work-to-family conflict

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