What Goes on at Home Doesn’t Stay at Home: The Effect Of Family Related Conflict on Interpreting and Dealing With Common Workplace Events

Decisions made by managers in response to common workplace events often have important consequences. These decisions can include dealing with personnel issues, resources issues and procedural issues. A logic-based decision-making process requiring substantial information search and analysis can be very complex and time consuming. Managers frequently face conflicting demands for time and cognitive resources from their family and their job that adversely affect their ability to perform both roles effectively. Adverse effects of these conflicting roles that impede their decision-making processes can result from reduced time, energy and attention available to properly gather and analyze information for each major business or family decision and by increasing the number of major decisions to be made. This study assessed the effect of conflict between family and work roles on the information search behavior in a sample of credit union executives. The study found evidence of significant relationships between the amount of work-family and family-work conflict and the effect certain personal and impersonal information sources had on the actions these executives took in dealing with events that were both important and commonly encountered in the workplace. The significant relationships were positive and were more frequently related to impersonal information sources.