In the present post-modern society, employee stress costs companies over $80 billion annually due to low job morale, lost productivity, and health and disability claims (Edwards & Rothbard, 1999). Specifically, many hospitality employees struggle to fulfill work and family responsibilities. This struggle is due to long hours, irregular and inflexible work schedules, heavy workloads, low wages, and demanding and difficult customers (Karatepe and Aleshinloye, 2009, Karatepe and Olugbade, 2009 and Wong and Ko, 2009). Thus, work–family conflict can be a common work stressor of hospitality employees. Reason may suggest that differing levels of work–family conflict could generate different spillovers from life well-being to job attitude. For example, although satisfied with time commitments to life and home activities, an employee could still feel dissatisfied with his/her job and have strong turnover intentions when they cannot balance a heavy work load with family obligations. Therefore, understanding employees' work–family conflict (WFC) and encouraging a positive influence of employees' overall life well-being on job satisfaction could be cost beneficial to hospitality businesses.
Previous WFC research focuses on direct and indirect effects of WFC on life and job satisfaction but provides limited information about the role of WFC in the relationship between life and job satisfaction. Empirical investigations over the past three decades support strong associations between life satisfaction and job satisfaction. In past work, life satisfaction is described as overall subjective well-being, and job satisfaction is determined by affective and cognitive evaluations of the job (Brief, Butcher, George, & Link, 1993). The literature presents three different theoretical perspectives to explain the observed zero-order correlation between life and job satisfaction. These perspectives are the bottom-up perspective, the top-down perspective, and the dispositional and environmental perspective. Rode (2004) describes the bottom-up perspective as job satisfaction causing life satisfaction (Brief et al., 1993). Judge and Watanabe (1993) present the top-down perspective as life satisfaction influencing job satisfaction. The dispositional and environmental perspectives claim that environmental and dispositional variables affect life and job satisfaction (Judge, Locke, & Durham, 1997). Researchers of WFC cover the bottom-up perspective extensively, while giving the other two perspectives less research attention (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992). Consequently, more research needs to show influences of employees' overall life well-being on job attitudes and further understanding of moderating roles of WFC.
The purpose of this research is to examine influences of employee's well-being on work satisfaction while considering the moderating roles of WFC. This research extends theoretical understanding of the relationship between life satisfaction and job satisfaction by integrating the bottom-up perspective and the dispositional view in the WFC context. In terms of specifics, several factors are relevant. One is examining the main effects of life satisfaction on job satisfaction. A second is studying how WFC moderates the relationship of life satisfaction to job satisfaction. The other matter the authors pursue in this research is determining whether work-interfering-family (WIF) and family-interfering-work (FIW) have different moderating roles on the relationship of life satisfaction to job satisfaction.
The analysis of whether individuals' overall life well-being (i.e., life satisfaction) positively or negatively influences job satisfaction under different levels of work–family conflict yields significant conclusions in the hospitality industry. Not only does employees' life satisfaction create significantly positive spillover effects on job satisfaction, but such effects could vary depending on the high or low degrees of work-to-family (WIF) and family-to-work (FIW) interferences. Specifically, individuals' life satisfaction has positive spillover effects on job satisfaction when WIF and FIW are low, but the negative spillover effects cannot hold when WIF and FIW are high. The findings extend previous research on both the relationships between life and job satisfaction, and the role of work–family conflict.
5.1. Integrating the top-down and dispositional perspectives
The present study integrates the top-down perspective and the dispositional perspective on the relationships between life and job satisfaction. In the integrated model, the main effect of life satisfaction on job satisfaction (Hypothesis 1) reflects the top-down perspective, and WFC as the dispositional factor moderates these effects (H2a, H2b, H3a and H3b). On one hand, the findings illustrate the positive top-down relationship of individuals' overall life well-being to job attitudes, which as mentioned previously receives less research attention than other perspectives.
The positive relationship between life satisfaction and job satisfaction is by nature a spillover process. This spillover process indicates that employees bring dispositional life traits to the workplace that changes job attitudes and performance. This indication is important because the workplace is an open system in which social environmental changes (e.g., general social orientation and stress levels) can easily influence employees' attitudes and behaviors but they may not be able to use the compensatory or segmentation approach to balance life and work. In this case, WFC is one of the critical work stressors at the workplace in a post-modern society, where individuals have dispositional differences in their family–work relationships and experience different levels of organizational support when balancing work–family conflicts.
On the other hand, after controlling the main effects, the results demonstrate that WFC as a dispositional factor moderates the relationship between life satisfaction and job satisfaction. This finding illustrates that hospitality employees' level of balance between work and family issues influences the affective spillover between life and job attitudes. Since individuals have limited amounts of time, effort and resources, they become impatient, stressed or even burned out when work–family conflicts increase.
Under such negative affect states, individuals find it hard to have positive spillovers from life to job satisfaction. Struggling with work tasks and family burdens leads them to feel exhausted with their lives, and possibly transfer negative feelings to the workplace and ultimately attribute negative life feelings to job aspects. Conversely, when individuals handle their workloads and family obligations well, they tend to positively interpret life information and transfer happiness to their work. Only when work and family are balanced are individuals who live better happier at work.
5.2. The moderating roles of WIF and FIW
WIF and FIW as two dimensions of WFC moderate the relationship between LSA and JSA. Consistent with the hypotheses, the present study finds that the moderating effects of WIF/FIW explain the conditions in which positive spillovers from life to job domains occur. Previous studies often suggest that the spillovers between life and job attitudes exist, but rarely examine the conditions in which the spillovers are positive. This study's results extend the existing research by demonstrating that when WIF and FIW are low, life satisfaction positively influences job satisfaction. That is, when work and family demands do not interfere with each other, employees who have higher life well-being feel greater job satisfaction.
Unexpectedly, the present results failed to suggest WIF and FIW as moderators of negative life-to-work spillovers. That is, the degree of employees' work–family conflict may not be able to change the effects of life dissatisfaction on job attitudes. This finding possibly results from the nature of employees' lives and jobs. Although spillovers between life and work exist, employees often regard positive work behaviors and attitudes as job requirements by the organization no matter how individuals feel at home or in life events. This opinion is particularly true for hotel employees.
They are emotional laborers since they have to display positive emotions at service encounters (e.g., always smiling at customers) as part of hotels' job requirements (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). Consequently, hospitality employees have to separate their work and family lives clearly, especially when they do not feel well outside the workplace. By doing so, they can accomplish service work well and earn money to support family and life needs.
5.3. Practical implications
Previous studies widely examine the impacts of job satisfaction on life satisfaction, and the relevant results imply how attitudinal outcomes on the job influence employees' life well-being. In fact, managers are more interested in how employees' life events and well-being affect job attitudes so that they can design appropriate human resource strategies and policies to take proper action to enforce the positive spillovers from life to job. The results of this study can help mangers to understand the conditions in which positive spillovers occur from employees' life satisfaction to job satisfaction.
The findings then have meaningful implications for managers who often focus attention on increasing employee satisfaction and performance. For example, hotel managers may have to first investigate what their own employees' specific life and family concerns may be that have the potential to hinder positive job attitudes. Accordingly, hotels could make efforts to deal with these concerns such as implementing family-friendly policies and/or offering more opportunities (e.g., paid vacation) for employees to cope with social stress. Hotel managers can also provide employee training on self-regulation and stress management to better deal with stress from family and daily life.
The results would also be useful for international hotel chains expanding their business, specifically in China. Since the “Open Door Policy”, Chinese peoples' values are changing from a traditional job-centered orientation to a focus on the pursuit of present life quality. That is, although they used to sacrifice their lives to advance their careers, now they work for a better life. Consequently, Chinese hotel employees tend to treat work as a way to improve their life quality, which becomes a critical motivational factor in their performance and turnover intentions.
A hotel employee usually changes his or her job solely because of factors such as community, living cost, paid vacation days, family gatherings or child care. This fact should remind international hotel chains that Chinese hotel employees may not be as “cheap” as labor statistics may imply, and their new hotels must offer well-designed benefit plans in order to keep talented employees and obtain high service quality. Furthermore, the culture of Chinese business is now competitive and stressful. Helping employees to cope with social stress and to relax should become a concern of human resources personnel within Chinese hotels.
5.4. Limitations and future research
Life satisfaction, job satisfaction, WIF and FIW are highly related and the current survey was correlational and cross-sectional in nature. Confounding factors could be responsible for some results. Also, alternative explanations may explain observations as well or better. Specifically, although regression results are significant, R2 is not high. Alternative models with current variables or models with other variables may yield better explanations rather than confirming this research.
Further, the researchers make the assumption that the sample from meetings in the Pearl River Delta area of China gives results that apply to all of China. Implicitly, the assumption is that results are applicable to employees other than hotel sales managers worldwide. Research on other groups is necessary to generalize results. Finally, the response rate of the present mail survey is 40.3% but the sample size is relatively small (N = 121), which may increase the concerns about sample representativeness and bias the results (Krosnick, 1999).
In summary, the present study integrates the top-down perspective and the dispositional perspective on the relationship between life and job satisfaction, and demonstrates the moderating roles of employees' work–family conflict in the positive spillovers from life to job satisfaction. The results could inspire many future research directions. Future research could pay attention to the environmental perspective and examine the critical environmental factors moderating or mediating the relationships between life and job satisfaction. The present study focuses on the dispositional factors, but employees do not live in a vacuum. Many environmental factors in family, organization and society influence employees' life and job attitudes.
Identifying these contextual impacts as well as the interactions with employees' dispositions would be meaningful. Further, future studies could investigate the mediators and/or moderators of the negative spillovers between life and job satisfaction. The results add new insights to the present theoretical understandings, but managers would also be interested to know how the negative impact of life well-being on work attitudes would change. A final suggestion is an examination of how researchers could apply or revise the present results in different contexts, under various culture backgrounds, or within diverse social communities. Investigations of the generalization of the relationships of life to job satisfaction could not only help build a more general model but also make implications for managers in different conditions.
