员工通勤体验对员工工作家庭增益和冲突的影响

Abstract

Commuting is an integral part of modern life, with its efficiency and quality significantly impacting employees' work and personal lives. Post-pandemic commuting time extensions have created challenges for employees. Data from major Chinese cities reveals prolonged commuting distances and durations in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, accompanied by "extreme commuting" phenomena. Excessive commuting time not only affects personal health and well-being but also poses environmental concerns. However, research remains relatively scarce regarding how commuting influences work-family interfaces, particularly work-family enrichment (WFE) and conflict (WFC). This study focuses on examining the impact of commuting duration and quality on WFE and WFC, while investigating the roles of psychological resource depletion and impulse control demands. Adopting a management psychology perspective and employing questionnaire surveys grounded in Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we propose a theoretical framework where employees’ commuting experiences affect their WFE/WFC rated by their spouses through employees’ psychological resource depletion, subsequently verifying relevant hypotheses.
Through daily mobile terminal-delivered questionnaires collecting data on commuting duration, quality, psychological resource depletion, WFE, and WFC, this research analyzes relationships between employees’ commuting parameters (independent variables) and their work-family outcomes (dependent variables), while exploring mediating effects of employees’ psychological resource depletion and moderating effects of employees’ impulse control demands. Key findings include: 1) Longer commutes and poorer commuting quality exacerbate psychological resource depletion; 2) This effect intensifies for employees with high impulse control demands; 3) Commuting characteristics indirectly influence WFE/WFC through resource depletion. These results demonstrate that commuting involves not only temporal costs but also psychological and emotional resource expenditures.
The findings carry significant organizational implications. Enterprises could implement flexible work arrangements (e.g., remote work or flexible hours) and improve commuting environments (e.g., shuttle services) to reduce commuting burdens. Additionally, providing psychological support and emotional management training could enhance employees' commuting resilience. Future research should investigate cultural influences on commuting work-family relationships, longitudinal impacts on family life quality, and bidirectional relationships between commuting experiences and work-family outcomes using simultaneous equation modeling.

Date of Award	17 Apr 2025
Original language	Chinese (Simplified)
Awarding Institution	China Europe International Business School
Supervisor	Katherine Rong Xin (Supervisor) & Ho Kwong Kwan (Supervisor)