Too Alienated to Have Good Family Lives? The Impact of Work Alienation on Family Functioning.

We extend the work alienation literature by moving beyond a focus on work-related consequences. Rather, we explored how and when work alienation influences employee family functioning (i.e., marital withdrawal behavior and family performance) from the work-home resources (W-HR) perspective. Using data from 265 Chinese employee-spouse dyads collected at three time points, we found that work alienation was positively related to marital withdrawal behavior and negatively related to family performance and that ego depletion mediated these relationships. Besides, we found that self-blame proneness accelerated the work alienation-ego depletion association and the indirect effect of work alienation on family functioning via ego depletion, while the ego deletion-family functioning linkage and the indirect effect of work alienation on family functioning via ego depletion were stronger when segmentation preference was low. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]