It is widely believed that work attitudes influence attitudes toward life overall. We investigated a multivariate model of work attitudes and overall life attitudes using survey data from two nationally representative (U.S.) data sets, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal. Including a comprehensive set of control variables, we found only weak support for the "attitudes spillover" perspective, suggesting that employees often compartmentalize or "segregate" their work and nonwork lives. We consider theoretical and practical implications of these findings.Researchers continue to assert that work life attitudes influence or spill over to overall life attitudes (e.g., Luthans, 2002) despite evidence to the contrary. Support for the spillover hypothesis comes from a classic review of the relationship between job satisfaction and life satisfaction which concluded that the average zero order correlation between the two variables was 0.44, when corrected for attenuation, or explaining about 17% of the variance (Tait et al., 1989). However, results of multivariate analyses, controlling for the effects of living and working conditions on both variables, have indicated that the correlation between life and job satisfaction is much smaller, explaining one percent to 10% of the overall variance (e.g., Andrews and Withey, 1976;Campbell et al., 1976;Near et al., 1983Near et al., , 1984. Additionally, few studies have examined the causality of the relationship, with longitudinal analyses. Using structural equation modeling, Judge and Watanabe (1993) found that job satisfaction at Time 1 predicted life satisfaction five years later, but the effects were small from a practical standpoint (β = 0.07, p < 0.05). Using cross-lag partial correlation analysis and path analysis completed Portions of these analyses were presented at the meetings of the Midwest Academy of Management, 2002, Indianapolis. We would like to thank Tim Judge for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. © Springer 2005 Social Indicators Research (2005) 70: 79-109