Family Fairness and Cohesion in Marital Dyads: Mediating Processes Between Work–Family Conflict and Couple Psychological Distress

The well-being of employed adults is linked to demands and resources in both work and
family domains. This study takes a family systems approach to understand how an
employee’s work–family conflict and their spouse’s observed work–family conflict can
create stress within a family unit by negatively impacting employee and spousal
perceptions of fairness in the division of household labour. This decreased fairness is
related to reduced family cohesion, which we argue is a key resource in the family domain. These variables were assessed by data collected from military personnel and their spouses in a sample of 78 marital dyads. Analyses using the actor–partner interdependence model and maximum likelihood bootstrapping supported our contention that work–family conflict is related to family cohesion through perceived fairness in the division of household labour. However, after accounting for the strong direct effect employee’s reported work-to-family conflict has on employee’s psychological distress, reduced family cohesion was only directly related to the psychological distress of employee’s spouses, and not employees themselves. We suggest that these findings support the importance of taking a family systems approach to more fully contextualize the impact of dual-domain challenges on employee well-being.