Cross-domain Effects of Work-family Conflict on Organizational Commitment and Performance

Two important hypotheses concerning the consequences of work-family conflict are matching-domain effect and cross-domain effect. However, neither of these has been explicitly tested in a Chinese context despite the increasing attention given by business and organization researchers to the Chinese business world. Moreover, the extant evidence is less clear for performance outcomes than for attitudinal outcomes. In this study, we considered both economic and cultural characteristics of employees to examine the relationships between bidirectional work-family conflict and work outcomes in China. We surveyed a sample of 241 supervisor-subordinate dyads employed at 3 hospitals in Beijing and Xi’an and found that, among our participants, family-to-work conflict was negatively related to affective and normative commitment to the organization that employed them, and that family-to-work conflict, rather than work-to-family conflict, was negatively related to their task performance at work.