An Examination of the Effects of Sharing Work Events with the Spouse at Home

While much research has examined how (positive and negative) events at work can spillover to influence employees’ family lives, less research has been conducted examining how such events may crossover to affect the employee’s spouse through social sharing. In this paper, we design one scenario-based experiment and one quasi-experimental experience sampling study to investigate how sharing work events with one’s spouse influences familial outcomes through the crossover mechanism of spousal empathy, and go one step further to test the (counterintuitive) hypothesis that sharing negative events has stronger positive implications for employees’ family lives compared to sharing positive events. In addition, we also test, in an exploratory fashion, how the effects of daily social sharing extend beyond same-day family outcomes to affect employees’ psychological well-being at work on the following day. The results of our studies highlight the roles of social sharing and empathy in bridging the work-family domains.