| In the past few decades,with the continuous improvement of education level,the proportion of women in the labor market has gradually increased.Dual-earner families have become the main family structure of married couples,and men have gradually participated in family production.The traditional concept of “male leading outside and female leading inside” has been broken,and individuals have to face the dual needs of work and family roles at the same time.Frequent role transitions lead to increasingly blurred boundaries between work and family.The development of technology has broken down physical boundaries,and individuals can conduct work and family affairs anytime and anywhere.The continuous overlap of the work and family domains poses enormous challenges for employees to manage the work-family boundary and achieve work-family balance.In academia,the actual boundaries an individual enacts between work and family is called work-family boundary enactment.It reflects the actual degree of segmentation or integration an individual has established to fulfill work and family roles.In the context of the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and family,it is of high practical and academic research value to explore how to enact boundaries between work and family and better fulfill the roles of work and family.The research in the field of work and family has been dominated by the conflict perspective,and more and more scholars call for research strengthening the positive perspective.However,after reviewing the literature,it was found that the connotation and measurement of work-family boundary enactment in existing research need to be further explored.The research on the mechanism of work-family boundary enactment is still dominated by the conflict perspective,and the discussion of the positive perspective is still insufficient.Aiming at the insufficiency of work-family boundary enactment connotation and measurement,this study follows the basic paradigm of scale development to develop a work-family boundary enactment scale for Chinese employees.This study obtained textual data on employees’ work-family boundary enactment through literature research and semi-structured interviews,and used grounded theory coding procedures to code the textual data,and on this basis through item polishing,item matching and item confirmation to determine the time,physical,behavioral and cognition aspects of Chinese employees’ work-family boundary enactment.On this basis,a 14-item prediction scale for the family-to-work boundary enactment and a 13-item prediction scale for the work-to-family boundary enactment are generated,including four types of boundaries.Using the collected 133 valid questionnaires for scale purification and structural exploration,a 10-item measurement scale for family-to-work boundary enactment and a 10-item measurement for work-to-family boundary enactment including three types of boundaries of time,physical and cognition boundaries were generated.In the scale validity testing stage,92 valid questionnaires were used to verify the reliability and validity of the scale.Aiming at the lack of research perspectives on the mechanism of work-family boundary enactment,this study explores the positive and negative ways of work-family boundary enactment from the dual perspectives of role conflict and role enhancement.This study focuses on work-to-family boundary enactment,and uses work-to-family integration enactment to represent the integration degree of individuals in the direction of work-to-family enactment.High work-to-family integration enactment means that individuals enact the integration boundary in the direction of work-to-family.Low work-to-family integration enactment indicates that individuals enact a separation boundary in the work-to-family direction.This study integrates the dual perspectives of role conflict and role enhancement.Based on the conservation of resources theory,it explores the double-edged sword effect of the work-to-family integration enactment of Chinese enterprise employees on emotional exhaustion through the dual paths of work-family conflict and work-family positive spillover,and compares the mediation effects of the two.In addition,based on the identity theory,the moderating role of family role salience was discussed.This research model proposed that multiple roles caused by work-to-family integration enactment may cause work-family conflict due to the competition between roles for limited resources,and may also cause work-family positive spillover due to the expansion of resources brought by multiple roles.The loss and gain of resources caused by work-family conflict and work-family positive spillover will lead to the increase and decrease of emotional exhaustion respectively.Conservation of resources theory suggests that the loss of resources will have a greater impact than the gain of resources.Therefore,the mediating effect of work-family conflict will be greater than the mediating effect of work-family positive spillover.In addition,individuals with high family roles salience will protect family roles.Specifically,on the one hand,they will protect family roles from intrusion and be sensitive to the pressure brought by intrusion of family roles;On the other hand,they are willing to invest resources from other fields into family roles to achieve the success of family roles.Therefore,the family role salience will affect the individual’s attitude towards the multiple roles of work and family brought by work-to-family integration enactment.On the one hand,they are sensitive to the pressure of work roles invading family roles;On the other hand,they tend to use multiple roles of work and family to invest the resources of work roles in family roles.In this study,210 valid questionnaires of enterprise married employees collected in three waves were used to test the theoretical model and research hypothesis by SPSS and R Studio software,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)Work-to-family integration enactment positively affects work-family conflict.(2)Work-to-family integration enactment positively affects work-family positive spillovers.(3)Work-family conflict positively affects emotional exhaustion.(4)Work-family conflict plays a mediating role between employees’ work-to-family integration enactment and emotional exhaustion.(5)Work-family positive spillover plays a mediating role between employees’ work-to-family integration enactment and emotional exhaustion.(6)The mediating effect of work-family conflict is greater than the mediating effect of work-family positive spillover.(7)Family role salience plays a positive moderating role between the work-to-family integration enactment and work-family conflict.(8)Family role salience positively moderates the mediating effect of work-family conflict between work-to-family integration enactment and emotional exhaustion.The theoretical contributions of this thesis are as follows:(1)this thesis clarifies the connotations of four types of boundaries used by Chinese employees to enact the work-family boundary,which deepens the academic understanding of the concept of work-family boundary enactment.(2)this thesis develops a new scale for measuring work-family boundary enactment in the Chinese context,which provides a reliable measurement tool for empirical research on work-family boundary enactment.(3)this thesis reveals the double-edged sword effect of work-to-family integration enactment on emotional exhaustion,and expands the theoretical perspective of research on the relationship between the two.(4)this thesis reveals the moderating effect of family role salience on the relationship between work-to-family integration enactment and emotional exhaustion,and clarifies the effect boundary of work-to-family integration enactment on emotional exhaustion.The management implications of this thesis are as follows:(1)to help enterprises guide employees to more effectively manage the boundary between work and family.(2)to help enterprises effectively promote the positive effect of work-to-family integration enactment,alleviate the negative effect,and provide suggestions for enterprises to reduce employees’ emotional exhaustion. |
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