Consequences of combining work and family roles: A closer look at cross-domain versus within-domain relations

Research on the work-family interface seems to pile up in pace with the ever increasing number of employees combining work and family roles. Two major developments in the work-family literature can be distinguished. First, over the past few decades, the focus in the literature has shifted from perceiving the combination of work and family roles as mainly problematic, resulting in conflict (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985) to perceiving the combination of work and family roles also as possibly enriching (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006: Rothbard, 2001; Wayne et al., 2007), hereby reflecting more adequately how work and family life may influence each other. Second, whereas early research assessed work-family conflict as a general concept, scholars now broadly agree that both conflict and enrichment are bi-directional in nature. That is, individuals can experience that their work conflicts with family life, and vice versa, that their family life conflicts with work (Gutek, Searle and Klepa, 1991). In the same vein, it can be experienced that work enriches family life, and that family life enriches work (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006). With regard to conflict, ample empirical evidence is supporting the notion that work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict are distinct experiences that each have their own causes in different domains. For instance, Mesmar-Magnus and Viswesveran (2005) performed a meta-analytic examination of the convergence of work-to-family and family-to-work conflict and concluded that - despite some overlap - the two concepts indeed are statistically distinct and have correlates in respectively the work and the family domain. With regard to enrichment, Carlson et al. (2006) developed and validated a questionnaire to measure both work-to-family enrichment and family-to-work enrichment. On the basis of their validation study in five different samples they concluded that enrichment is bi-directional too. Thus, both family-to-work and work-to-family conflict and enrichment are distinct processes as they seem to have their causes in different domains. However, it has to be noted that the above conclusions are mainly derived from cross-sectional studies indicating that reversed or reciprocal causal relationships cannot be ruled out.