Enriching or depleting? The dynamics of engagement in work and family.

Abstract

The increase of dual-career couples and single parent families has highlighted the problem of how people manage their engagement in work and family and how employees' multiple roles affect their productivity. By engagement I mean the attention devoted to and absorption in a role. In my dissertation, I investigate what explains people's engagement in work and family roles and how engagement in one role affects engagement in another role. Two competing arguments, the depletion and enrichment arguments, have contrasting predictions for how engagement in one role relates to engagement in another role. The depletion argument that dominates the work-family literature suggests that there is a negative relationship between work and family engagement. In contrast, the enrichment argument that is espoused in research on role accumulation suggests that there is a positive relationship between work and family engagement. I integrate these two competing arguments revealing the emotion-based processes that link work and family engagement. To test these relationships, I surveyed approximately 1300 respondents from a previous data collection effort and received nearly 800 completed surveys for a response rate of approximately 60%. I am using structural equation modeling to test my hypotheses. My findings indicate that there is support for both the enrichment and depletion arguments. However, in contrast to the assumptions of the work-family literature, stronger support exists for the enrichment rather than the depletion argument. Moreover, there are a number of differences between men and women in terms of how engagement in one role is related to engagement in another role. Specifically, while men experience enrichment from work to family, women experience depletion from work to family. Conversely, while women experience enrichment from family to work, men do not experience linkages from family to work.