Work–family conflict, emotional exhaustion, and displaced aggression toward others: The moderating roles of workplace interpersonal conflict and perceived managerial family support.

Abstract

Taking a resource-based self-regulation perspective, this study examined afternoon emotional exhaustion as a mediator linking the within-person relations between morning work-family conflict and later employee displaced aggression in the work and family domains. In addition, it examined resource-related contextual factors as moderators of these relations. The theoretical model was tested using daily diary data from 125 employees. Data were collected at 4 time points during each workday for 3 consecutive weeks. Multilevel modeling analysis showed that morning family-to-work conflict was positively related to afternoon emotional exhaustion, which in turn predicted displaced aggression toward supervisors and coworkers in the afternoon and displaced aggression toward family members in the evening. In addition, morning workplace interpersonal conflict exacerbated the impact of morning work-to-family conflict on afternoon emotional exhaustion, whereas perceived managerial family support alleviated the impact of morning family-to-work conflict on afternoon emotional exhaustion. These findings indicate the importance of adopting a self-regulation perspective to understand work-family conflict at work and its consequences (i.e., displaced aggression) in both work and family domains.

Customer Mistreatment: A Review of Conceptualizations and a Multilevel Theoretical Model

“…Although displacing one's anger onto others violates desirable social norms and expectations (e.g., the principle of reciprocity; Bordia, Restubog, & Tang, 2008) and the impulse to displace one's anger ought to be regulated and inhibited (e.g., Bushman et al, 2005), this regulation process may become less effective when employees suffer self-regulation impairment after customer mistreatment. Consequently, employees may find it difficult to regulate their aggressive impulses and may be more likely to lash out at others (i.e., exhibit more displaced aggression), including other customers, coworkers and supervisors at work, and family members at home (e.g., Liu et al, 2015). As such, displaced aggression may serve as a bridge between work life and home life.…”

Commuting stress process and self‐regulation at work: Moderating roles of daily task significance, family interference with work, and commuting means efficacy

“…As commuting strain increases, it consumes more resources, leaving fewer resources available for self‐regulation at work. Supporting this argument, empirical research found that commuting strain is positively related to workplace aggression (Hennessy, ), which has been shown to be a result of impaired capacity of self‐regulation (Y. Liu et al., ; Thau & Mitchell, ; Wang et al., ). Therefore, we propose: Hypothesis 2 :Morning commuting strain is negatively related to subsequent self‐regulation at work. …”

“…Specifically, daily task significance refers to the extent to which an employee's work tasks on a particular day have significant impact on other people (Hackman & Oldham, ). Family interference with work refers to the extent to which an employee is distracted from work by family‐related duties on a particular work day (Carlson & Frone, ; Y. Liu et al., ; Wang, Liu, Zhan, & Shi, ). We examine these two variables as potential moderators based on Beal et al.’s () model.…”

Prosocial response to client-instigated victimization: The roles of forgiveness and workgroup conflict.

“…Conversely, under low workgroup conflict, employees experience relatively fewer cognitive distractions, and correspondingly fewer demands on their available cognitive control resources. These resources are therefore less likely to be at risk (see Liu et al, 2015), leaving human service workers with greater potential to apply cognitive control resources to forgiveness efforts. However, as previously theorized, human service workers may not have the capacity to forgive due to cognitive impairment at egregious victimization levels, or they may perceive the task of forgiveness as too effortful at these levels to be worth the resource expenditure.…”