Combining work and family roles: A daily diary study examining the relationships between job demands, job resources, personal resources, family satisfaction, family task performance, and family relationship performance.

Abstract

Partly due to a growing number of working women (Gatrell, Burnett, Cooper, & Sparrow, 2013), an increasing amount of people must combine work and family roles. This can lead to either work-family conflict or work-family enrichment. The current research examines the influence of work characteristics on family life by studying job demands, job resources and family outcomes in a daily diary study. In addition, the mediating role of transient personal resources is examined. The data are collected using two daily diary questionnaires for a period of five consecutive working days. The questionnaires are filled in by a total of 126 married or cohabitating employees from different Dutch organizations who participated two to five days. Multilevel analysis shows that job demands and job resources both are related to transient personal resources such that job demands have a negative effect on personal resources and job resources have a positive effect on personal resources. Furthermore, job resources positively influence family outcomes, especially on person-level. Mediation analysis shows that transient personal resources explain some of the relationships between job characteristics and family outcomes. This means that work characteristics influence people’s personal resources, which in turn contribute to an increase in some of the family outcomes. However, the examined personal resources do not explain all the relationships between work characteristics and family outcomes.