Crossover effects of work-family conflict among Chinese couples

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the crossover effects of one partner’s work-family conflict (WFC) on the other partner’s family satisfaction, physical well-being, and mental well-being. The study tests the moderating effect of the opposite partner’s family identity salience within the crossover process in a Chinese context.

A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect matched data from 212 Chinese dual-earner couples. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was employed to test the research hypotheses.

The results showed that there were significantly negative crossover effects of husbands’ WFC on their wives’ family satisfaction, physical well-being, and mental well-being, and vice versa. The authors found that the wives’ family identity salience mitigated the crossover effects of the husbands’ WFC, but the husbands’ family identity did not moderate the crossover effect of the wives’ WFC.

This is the first study to investigate the crossover effects of WFC among dual-earner couples in China. Further, the study integrated family identity salience into the WFC crossover process between couples from the receiver’s view and provided evidence that partners differed in the ways they dealt with each other’s stress. This research advances scholarly discussions of the psychological crossover process and fills a key gap of considering complex role variables as moderators within this crossover process.