Longitudinal investigation on personality traits and mental health relationships: the mediating role of work-family interference and enhancement

BACKGROUND The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the Big Five personality traits on work-family interference/enhancement and mental health using a three-wave longitudinal design. PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE The paper draws on a sample (N = 886) from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. Structural equa-tion modeling was used to examine the measures of the variables and assess their associations across three time periods. RESULTS The results indicate that conscientiousness and emotional stability are the personality traits that are associated with work-to-family enhancement over time. In addition, work-to-family enhancement is a mediator between emotional stability and mental health. Overall, there exists a positive reciprocal relationship between work-to-family enhancement and mental health throughout the three waves. CONCLUSIONS This study showed that there is a bidirectional positive link between work-to-family enhancement and mental health. The find-ings suggest that organizations will benefit not only from developing interventions to enrich employees work skills, behav-iors/attitudes but also from promoting their mental health and emotional stability. This study is the first to confirm the partial mediation role of work-to-family enhancement between emotional stability and mental health, and bidirectional relations of work-to-family enhancement and mental health. Moreover, the longitudinal design of this study overcomes the limitations of prior cross-sectional studies in evaluating the relationships of constructs.