Committing to your work, spouse, and children: Implications for work-family conflict

When trying to balance work and family responsibilities, many workers experience conflict between these two roles. Although role commitment has been viewed both as contributing to and alleviating conflict, this relationship has not been fully tested. Using a sample of female nurses and police officers, we examined the direct and indirect relationship of role commitment with work-spouse and work-parent conflict. Increased work-spouse conflict was associated with decreased spouse commitment. Increased work-parent conflict was associated with increased parent commitment but with decreased spouse and job commitment. Job commitment moderated the relationships between irregular work schedules and work-spouse conflict and between job control and work-spouse conflict. Parent commitment moderated the relationship between irregular work schedules and work-parent conflict. These results suggest that, depending on the role, commitment may either alleviate or exacerbate conflict.     

企业员工职业承诺的结构模型研究

在文献研究基础上,通过访谈等方法,编制职业承诺问卷(OCQ)。通过对240名被试进行预测,修订得到正式问卷。重新选取11家企业的员工进行测试,获得330份有效问卷,数据的验证性因素分析结果表明:企业员工的职业承诺是四因素结构,包括情感承诺、规范承诺、代价承诺和选择限制承诺。     

Restauration d’un contexte de libre choix et insertion professionnelle des allocataires du RMI

This study deals with the vocational rehabilitation of minimum wage integration beneficiaries (RMI) and their commitment with an assistance service of vocational rehabilitation. We postulate that these public is perceived like not very autonomous by the welfare workers and that their freedom of action is some reduced. So we studied the impact of a context of freedom on the course of these public. Two results appeared. Firstly, a high context of freedom increases the commitment of people towards the welfare workers. Secondly, we observed that context of freedom did not have impact on the vocational rehabilitation of the individuals recently registered in RMI device. Nevertheless, in a freedom context, people registered since longer had the same probability to success that people recently registered in RMI device.     

Organizational and occupational commitment in relation to bridge employment and retirement intentions

Understanding the antecedents to retirement and bridge employment is important to older-aged adults who seek ways to smoothly transition to full retirement, and to organizations that benefit from retaining their highly skilled and most experienced workers, especially in occupations for which labor shortages are projected. We tested the effects of affective, continuance, and normative commitment to organizations and to occupations on older-aged pharmacists' (N = 294) intentions to fully retire and to pursue three types of bridge employment. As hypothesized, criteria that were more organizationally focused (e.g., bridge employment in the same organization) were predicted more strongly by organizational, rather than occupational, commitment. For one type of bridge employment that was more occupationally focused—bridge employment in a different field—the hypothesized differential effects were supported, such that it was predicted more strongly by occupational, rather than organizational, commitment. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, research, and practice.     

Idiosyncratic deals and organizational commitment

This article examines the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and organizational commitment. In particular, it examines how two individual differences which reflect self-worth (core self-evaluations and age) moderate that relationship. We predicted that employees with feelings of high self-worth will expect and will feel entitled to these deals, but employees with feelings of low self-worth will feel particularly obligated to reciprocate positively for special treatment. Data were collected from 375 managers at two points in time. As predicted, the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and affective organizational commitment was stronger for those managers who had low core self-evaluations. While the two-way interaction effect between idiosyncratic deals and age was not significant, we did find modest evidence for a three-way interaction effect. As predicted, the strongest relationship between idiosyncratic deals and organizational commitment occurred for older workers who had low core self-evaluations.     

Is it always fallacious to derive values from facts?

Since the time of David Hume, many philosophers have held that there is a logical Is/Ought gap. According to the doctrine of the Is/Ought gap, there are no valid (i.e., non-fallacious) arguments from purely factual premises about whatis the case to moral or normative conclusions about whatought to be. Occasionally, this doctrine has been challenged, but frequently it has been accepted without argumentation. Charles Pigden has recently argued for a logical Is/Ought gap on the grounds of the conservativeness of logic. I offer a counter-example which shows that Pigden's argument is unsound and that there need be no logical gap between Is-premises and an Ought-conclusion. My counter-example is an argument which is logically valid, has only Is-premises and an Ought-conclusion, and does not purport to violate the conservativeness of logic. Moreover, my argument does not rely, as other alleged counter-examples do, on controversial assumptions from Aristotelian biology about natures or ends, or about institutions such as promise-making.     

Age variations in the suicide rates and self-reported subjective well-being of married and never married persons

Previous research has established that people who never marry have higher suicide rates and lower self-reported subjective well-being than the married. The present study examines how the differences between: (1) never married persons who live alone, (2) never married cohabitees; and (3) currently married people, vary between age groups. The relevance of such age variations for status integration theory and theories of marital selection is discussed. Summing up results from previous studies of suicide rates, the relative position of the never married is found to be most unfavourable for people in their 30s and 40s; the differences are smaller among the young and the old. Data on self-reported well-being are taken from a large-scale survey of the population of one of Norway's 19 counties (n = 51 000), and are analysed by means of ordinary multiple regression. With regard to single people who were married or who never married, the results are largely consistent with the suicide findings; the advantage of marriage increases until about 40 years of age, then declines. The survey data also provide information about unmarried cohabitation, which seems to be more or less equivalent to marriage in most age groups. Neither status integration theory nor any other single theory of marriage effects or marital selection seems to be able to account for these findings in a satisfactory way.     

Cardiovascular Reactivity During Marital Conflict in Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings: Differential Associations with Relationship and Individual Functioning Across Contexts

Cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict is considered to be one of the main pathways for relationship distress to impact physical, mental, and relationship health. However, the magnitude of association between cardiovascular reactivity during laboratory marital conflict and relationship functioning is small and inconsistent given the scope of its importance in theoretical models of intimate relationships. This study tests the possibility that cardiovascular data collected in laboratory settings downwardly bias the magnitude of these associations when compared to measures obtained in naturalistic settings. Ambulatory cardiovascular reactivity data were collected from 20 couples during two relationship conflicts in a research laboratory, two planned relationship conflicts at couples’ homes, and two spontaneous relationship conflicts during couples’ daily lives. Associations between self‐report measures of relationship functioning, individual functioning, and cardiovascular reactivity across settings are tested using multilevel models. Cardiovascular reactivity was significantly larger during planned and spontaneous relationship conflicts in naturalistic settings than during planned relationship conflicts in the laboratory. Similarly, associations with relationship and individual functioning variables were statistically significantly larger for cardiovascular data collected in naturalistic settings than the same data collected in the laboratory. Our findings suggest that cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict in naturalistic settings is statistically significantly different from that elicited in laboratory settings both in magnitude and in the pattern of associations with a wide range of inter‐ and intrapersonal variables. These differences in findings across laboratory and naturalistic physiological responses highlight the value of testing physiological phenomena across interaction contexts in romantic relationships.     

The Use of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Promote Mental Health and School Engagement in University Students: A Multisite Randomized Controlled Trial

The aim of this multisite randomized controlled trial was to determine whether an intervention based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was efficacious in improving university students’ psychological flexibility, mental health, and school engagement. Students were recruited in four Canadian universities and randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 72) or a wait-list control group (n = 72). Students in the intervention group took part in four 2.5-hour workshops during a 4-week period and were asked to do exercises at home (e.g., meditation, observation grids). Wait-list students received the intervention soon after the post measurements. MANCOVAs and ANCOVAs revealed that students in the intervention group showed greater psychological flexibility at postintervention than those in the control group. They also reported greater well-being and school engagement, and lower stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms. Taken together, results of this study suggest that an ACT-based intervention offers a valuable way to promote mental health and school engagement in postsecondary settings.     

Dyadic effects of marital satisfaction on coparenting in Chinese families: Based on the actor‐partner interdependence model

Based on the actor‐partner interdependence model, this study explored the spillover and crossover effects of marital satisfaction on coparenting in Chinese nuclear and extended families. Spillover and crossover effects refer to the transfer of experiences, affects or behaviors, focusing on the intra‐personal and inter‐personal transfer of a marital subsystem to a coparenting subsystem. The participants comprised 279 couples with children ranging in age from 3 to 7 years old. The marital satisfaction and extent of coparenting of both the fathers and the mothers was tested to examine the dyadic interaction. Structural equation modeling results revealed significant intra‐personal and inter‐personal correlations between marital satisfaction and coparenting, indicating spillover and crossover effects in nuclear and extended families, and there were no differences between the two family structures. The results indicated that fathers' marital satisfaction influenced both fathers' and mothers' coparenting practices.