Trident University

Module 1 Case Paper

Management and Organizational Behavior 501

Introduction

I know whenever I have a bad day at work I am not in a very good mood when I get home. I think most people cannot help but carry some of their mood from work home with them. And things at home can affect your mood at work, particularly if it is negative. In this paper I will discuss what I believe job satisfaction spillover is and whether it is a positive or negative. I will also analyze the results of the study conducted in the required reading article and discuss the conclusions that came from the study.

Discussion

To me, job satisfaction spillover is basically letting what happens at work affect your home life and what happens at home, affect your work. So if you have a bad day at work, you are most likely going to be in a bad mood when you first get home. Of course some people are able to separate their work and personal lives, but I believe no matter how hard you try, they will affect each other to some degree. If you are having problems with your family at home, most of the time it is hard to not think about it when you are at work. This is going to affect your work. I think being unhappy at home has a greater affect on work, than does being happy at work has on home life.

If you truly enjoyed your job and felt satisfied, you feel good about your situation. This would probably put you in a good mood when you left work and went home. But if you did not like what you did for work, you would probably be in a bad mood. Depending on how much work you are required to do at home, seems to have an effect on job satisfaction spillover. If you have to always be readily available and accessible for work, it seems spillover can have a greater impact. I think job spillover can be a positive or negative thing depending on the situation. If you feel or have a positive experience at work or at home, it will most likely spillover into a positive feeling in both places. On the flip side, if you have a negative experience, you would probably have a negative spillover effect. So spillover would be positive when good things or feelings occur and negative when bad things happen.

In figure 1 of the article, the authors were illustrating the positive effect that job satisfaction spillover has on the home and figure 2 shows the effect when there it is negative. In the experiments, the degree to which work was integrated into family life was also considered and shown in the figures. Those that had to continuously check in or report from home were considered to have high work-family integration. Low work-family integration allowed employees to easily separate work from family life.

In figure 1, those with a high work-family integration and high job satisfaction show a high positive affect at home, where those with a low job satisfaction show a lower positive affect. Those that have low work-family integration and high job satisfaction show a lower positive affect at home than those with low job satisfaction. This is the opposite of those with high work-family integration. The difference between each end of the spectrum for those with high integration is much greater. The difference for those with low integration is a much more gradual change.

In figure 2, those with a high work-family integration and high job satisfaction show a low negative affect at home and those with a low job satisfaction show a greater negative effect on home life. Those with a low integration and high job satisfaction show a higher negative affect than those with low job satisfaction. Just as in figure 1, the increase or decrease is less drastic in the low work-family integration data than the high integration.

Six hypotheses were presented in the article. Out of the six, two were supported by figures 1 and 2 and one was not supported by either figure. The fourth hypothesis “predicted that the tendency for employees with higher daily job satisfaction to experience higher positive affect at home will be stronger for employees who are more rather than less work-family role-integrated” (Ilies and Wagner 2009). This hypothesis is supported by figure 1. It shows that those with high integration and higher job satisfaction do experience higher positive affect at home, compared to those that have a low integration.

Hypothesis 5 “predicted that the tendency for employees with higher daily job satisfaction to experience lower negative affect at home will be stronger for employees who are more rather than less work-family role-integrated” (Ilies and Wagner 2009). This hypothesis is supported by the data shown in figure 2 by illustrating that lower job satisfaction has a greater negative affect at home for those that have high work-family integration.

Hypothesis 6 “predicted that the tendency for employees with higher daily job satisfaction to experience more daily marital satisfaction at home will be stronger for employees who are more rather than less work-family role-integrated” (Ilies and Wagner 2009). Neither figure could support this hypothesis because they could not show a correlation between job satisfaction, work-family role integration and martial satisfaction. But looking at how positive and negative home is influenced by daily job satisfaction, it is understandable why this hypothesis was introduced.

After examining the results from the study, the authors came to three basic conclusions. The first conclusion basically states that when job spillover occurs, employees’ family can see the effect in the employee in some way. This could be in the mannerisms or behavior of the employee that may not be normal. Mood changes would also be an indication.

The second conclusion states that the affect of job spillover on mood when at home or marital satisfaction is not influenced just by mood at work. During the testing, moods at work were controlled, and there was still a decrease or little change in job satisfaction spillover with the changes in mood at work. There must be other factors that other than simply job satisfaction that affect mood at home and martial satisfaction. These could be personality driven or perhaps external influences from outside parties.

The third conclusion states that the differences in an individual’s work-family role integration play a large part in job satisfaction spill over to home life. The results of the experiment showed that the more an employee integrated his work with family life, the more affect job satisfaction spill over had. This was for both positive and negative affects alike.

These conclusions illustrate how an employee’s job satisfaction can affect what happens in their home life and vice versa. The results of the study show a direct correlation to job satisfaction spillover and positive or negatives affects at home. Depending on how integrated a person’s work and family life are, the spillover effects could be more dramatic. Basically someone that is happy with work will be happier at home.

Closing

What happens at home is going to affect your work and what happens at work is going to affect your home. No matter how hard you try to separate the two, emotions and thoughts will always be there. You may be able to lessen the degree to which you let it affect one or the other, but not completely eliminate it. Because of this “spillover”, I think the best thing you can do is try to let the negatives have a lesser affect than the positives.

References

Ilies, R., Wilson, K. S., and Wagner, D. T. (2009). The spillover of daily job satisfaction onto employees’ family lives: The facilitating role of work-family integration. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 87–102.