When workplace family-support is misallocated: The importance of value congruence and fairness perceptions in predicting work-family conflict and job attitudes

To better manage our work demands and family demands, we often erect mental or physical “borders” to help us provide order to our experience. However, the preference for how we preserve these borders differs across individuals (i.e., preference to segment or integrate work and family roles). Because supervisors and their support play a huge role in work-family balance, the current study investigated how having work-family values with respect to segmentation-integration that are congruent with one’s supervisor can lessen work-family conflict, through the receipt of appropriate work-family support. The present study used fairness perceptions of workplace family-support as an explanation for this process. With a sample of 815 staff members at a southern University, I analyzed the model and hypotheses. The results of the study indicate that value congruence is negatively related to work-family conflict, and positively related to job satisfaction and affective commitment. Furthermore, with analyzing the model in PROCESS (Preacher & Hayes, 2009), the results support partial mediation for both fairness perceptions and work-family conflict as mediators in the model. Several supplemental analyses were also conducted, which examined other serial mediation, moderation, and moderated-mediation models. The full results of these supplemental analyses and analyses performed by subpopulations (e.g., married with children, employees over forty years of age) are provided in detail.