Work-family spillover of satisfaction: The moderating role of domain boundary strength and identity salience

Answering calls to further explore the role of cognition in the work-family interface, this study examines the cognitive work-family spillover of satisfaction. Moreover, to date, theories have proposed identical effects and moderators for the work-to-family and the family-to-work directions of spillover, an assumption termed the bidirectional parallelism thesis, which we will test. The objective of this study is therefore to examine work-family boundary strength and domain identity salience as moderators of the spillover of satisfaction from work to family and from family to work. First, while the literature has mostly focused on the positive consequences of boundary strength, we draw on boundary theory to posit that boundary strength of the receiving domain limits satisfaction spillover. Second, in accordance with the enactment effect derived from boundary theory, we argue that spillover originates more strongly from domains that are salient in one's identity. To test these hypotheses, 2637 Canadian workers participated in a two-wave study. Structural equation modelling analyses showed that job satisfaction had a lagged relationship with family satisfaction irrespective of the levels of home boundary strength and work identity salience. Inversely, family satisfaction had a significant lagged relationship with job satisfaction only when work boundary strength was low or when family identity salience was high. This study contributes to work-family theories by extending their propositions to satisfaction as a cognitive component of subjective well-being, as well as testing its spillover in a time frame consistent with the greater stability of cognitive evaluations.