ABSTRACT
There are probably no two other aspects of everyday life that come together with such regularity, yet complexity, as work and family. Dual income families with children are currently the predominant household composition in the U.S.A. (Bianchi & Raley, 2005), replacing the family structure of decades past in which husbands worked outside the home and wives worked inside the home. The traditional family structure, primarily the result of changes in American society following World War II, contributed to the notion of home as a haven, where working husbands retired from the stresses of the workday to the restorative domestic sphere nurtured by their wives. Demographic shifts to the typical American household are due primarily to women entering the paid workforce en masse, with the workforce today comprised of about 49 percent women and 51 percent men (Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Prottas, 2003). The labor force participation rate of all women ages 25-54 has hovered around 75 percent since the 1990s (Pew Research Center, 2007), and 2007 statistics show that 71 percent of mothers with children under 18 worked outside the home, compared to just 47 percent in 1975 (Galinsky, Aumann, & Bond, 2008). As women’s roles have changed dramatically over the past several decades, men have also experienced an evolution in the family realm, with married and employed fathers increasing the time they spend on household labor and childcare from 100 to 150 minutes per day, between 1965 and 2003 (Hook, 2006). Clearly,
most individuals in contemporary American society will grapple first hand with the challenges involved with employment outside the home, maintaining a household, and attending to relationships with spouse, children, and extended family. Indeed, the intersection of work and home is a key issue for today’s families. Compounding the challenges of balancing employment and family is the fact that
most workers feel burdened, pressured, and generally stressed by their jobs. Studies have shown that a large proportion of employed individuals report some stress at work, with 29 percent reporting feeling “quite a bit or extremely stressed at work” (Barsade, Wiesenfeld, & The Marlin Company, 1997). In fact, three-quarters of employees believe that workers today experience more job stress than a generation ago (Princeton Survey Research Associates, 1997). Feelings of pressure and burden from occupations may be attributed, in part, to the fact that people are simply working more hours; the combined weekly work hours of dual-earner couples with children under the age of 18 has increased from 81 to 91 hours since the 1970s (Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Prottas, 2003). It is little wonder that jobs and families have been characterized as competing “greedy institutions” demanding commitment and resources (Coser, 1974) from individuals who have finite quantities of both. While the home was once popularly depicted as a safe haven to which working individuals could retreat and recuperate from job stress (Baruch, Biener, & Barnett, 1987), this conceptualization of the separate natures of occupational and home domains is no longer applicable to the experiences of today’s families. As illustrated by the Mother from Family 2 at the start of this chapter, wellness in the workplace and wellness in the home are intertwined, and experiences on the job may impact the interpersonal dynamics of the family. We focus this chapter on how characteristics of occupations and subjective experiences
at work spillover and impact family interactions, relationships, and routines.1 According to the spillover model, jobs are thought to impact the worker’s cognitions, mood, and physiology, and carry over into the home by shaping the worker’s subsequent interactions with family members. Research has documented that employment can influence individual health and well-being in multiple ways, and that job stress in particular can have a negative effect on health (e.g., cardiovascular outcomes [Schnall, Schwartz, Landsbergis, Warren, & Pickering, 1998], depression and anxiety [Melchior, et al., 2007]). This chapter focuses on occupational influences on interpersonal well-being in the context of the family. First, we address how the characteristics and requirements of positions, such as work schedule or level of job autonomy, impact the family. Next, we look at how subjective experiences and perceptions in the workplace, particularly job stress, influence family relationships, and highlight how different aspects of the family relational climate act as contextual moderators in shaping how work permeates the family. Last, we describe some key contemporary issues that the work-family field is grappling with and propose an agenda for future research.
