Putting Families at the Center: the Role of Family System in Employee Work-Family Conflict and Voice Behavior

Work-family conflict has become one of the most prominent challenges of modern-day work and a prominent research topic. However, the “family” in the work-family interface has been undertheorized, while research focuses on the workplace factors and individual characteristics in relation to work-family conflict (WFC). Placing the family at the center of theorizing, we adopt the Contextual Model of Family Stress (CMFS) as an overarching framework, which conceptualizes the family as a complex system comprising the family members, the environment in which they are situated, and their interactions with the environment and with one another. Guided by CMFS, we theorized WFC as a disturbance to the family’s structural and psychological contexts, which creates strain on the family well-being. Furthermore, we argued that family strain could produce strain and stress back to the focal workers, which reduces their voice behaviors at work. We further argue that workers’ work-family segmentation preference will shape their experience of WFC and moderate the indirect effect of WFC on employee voice behavior through family well-being. We collected data across two multi-wave, time-lagged surveys in America (M-Turk, N = 330) and in China (organization employees, N = 209). We found that employee-rated family well-being mediates the negative relationship between WFC and voice behavior, and the indirect relationship is stronger as the employees’ preference for segmentation is higher. The results open up a promising avenue for more nuanced inquiry into the family system framework and its role in the work-family interface.