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Research Article

The Mutual Enhancement Effects of Multiple Roles

Kim, Hyoseon · Kim, Okseon

Published: January 2010 · Vol. 39, No. 2 · pp. 375-407
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Abstract

This study addresses the positive aspects of multiple roles, which have become an important issue due to the increase in dual-income households. Moving beyond early research on work-family balance that primarily focused on negative aspects such as work-family conflict, this study sought to demonstrate the processes of work-family enrichment, whereby performing multiple roles brings about positive experiences and outcomes through the spillover of resources between domains. Work-family enrichment refers to the phenomenon in which resources acquired through performing a role in one domain bring about qualitative improvement in role performance in another domain. Greenhaus and Powell classified the various factors that can enhance work-family enrichment into five types of resources: skills and perspectives, material resources, flexibility resources, psychophysical resources, and social capital resources. Using data from the 2007 Korean Women and Families Panel Survey, this study tested whether positive spillover to the other domain actually occurs when these resources classified by Greenhaus and Powell are acquired in one domain, with a sample of 1,138 married working women. The results supported the hypothesis that psychophysical resources from the work domain fully, and material resources partially, have a significant effect on work-to-family positive spillover, and partial support was found for the hypothesis that flexibility resources and psychophysical resources from the family domain affect family-to-work positive spillover. Additionally, regarding the hypothesis that resources from each domain would also affect positive spillover in the reverse direction, it was found that psychophysical resources from the family domain affect work-to-family positive spillover, and psychophysical resources from the work domain affect family-to-work positive spillover. However, due to the limitations of using panel data, skills and perspectives resources and social capital resources among the five resource types proposed by Greenhaus and Powell had to be excluded, and there were also limitations in item selection. Future research should expand the scope to include not only married women but also unmarried women and men, and should elucidate not only the facts of spillover but also the specific processes involved.
Keywords: 다중 역할일-가정 긍정적 전이일-가정 향상자원