The Relationship between Work Satisfaction and Work-Family Conflict: The Moderating Effect of Gender Schema

Employees are expected to fulfill their work requirements, however, employee also have to meet their family duties. Especially for a culture putting emphasize on female’s family duties or male’s work achievement, male and female employees could be very different in work-family conflicts. According to spillover perspective, studies showed that work satisfaction was negatively related to work-family conflict. And we proposed the effect will dependent on employee’s gender schema. According to role schema perspective, this study proposed that gender schema that is, males should go out to work and females should take good care of their family, would have a moderating effect on the relationship between work satisfaction and work-family conflict. Questionnaire data were collected from various Taiwanese companies and consisted of 238 full-time employees. Using multiple regression analysis, the result indicated that gender schema moderated the relationship between work satisfaction and work-family conflict. When employees held high gender schema, the relationship between work satisfaction and work-family conflict was positive. On the contrary, the relationship for low gender schema was not significant. The results of this study demonstrated the influence of gender schema in understanding employee work-family conflict. The limitations and suggestions for future studies were discussed.

Key words: work-family conflict, work satisfaction, gender schema, role schema theory, and Chinese society