Positive and negative work reflection, engagement and exhaustion in dual-earner couples: Exploring living with children and work-linkage as moderators

Many employees think about their work during off-job time. Scholars have suggested that whether work-related thoughts during off-job time have detrimental or beneficial effects on employees’ well-being and performance depends on the nature of these thoughts. In this study with dual-earner couples we examined whether employees’ positive and negative work reflection during off-job time are associated with their own and with their partners’ work engagement and exhaustion. Furthermore, we investigated whether (a) living with children and (b) being work-linked (i.e. working in the same organisation and/or working in the same profession) moderated these relations. Both partners of 130 German heterosexual dual-earner couples responded to online questionnaires. We estimated multilevel analyses using the actor–partner interdependence model to analyse our dyadic data. We found positive associations between employees’ positive work reflection and both their own and their partners’ work engagement. Employees’ positive work reflection was also associated with their decreased exhaustion. Employees’ negative work reflection was negatively associated with their own work engagement and positively associated with their own exhaustion but unrelated to their partners’ outcomes. Moderator analyses revealed that living with children weakened the link between employees’ positive work reflection and their own work engagement and strengthened the link between their negative work reflection and exhaustion. The presence of couples’ work-linkage did not moderate any of these relations. This study builds on previous research by showing that employees’ positive work-related thinking is not only beneficial to themselves but also to their partners. Furthermore, the results suggest that living with children constitutes an additional demand that reduces the motivational effects of positive work reflection and amplifies the detrimental effects of employees’ negative work reflection.