While there has been growing interest in how personal and work-related factors shape employees’ careers, we know little about how family demands affect career intentions. Drawing from role theory and boundary theory, we examine the indirect effect of family-role overload on career intentions via family-interferes-with-work (FIW), as well as the conditional indirect effect of boundary management on these relationships.
Utilizing two waves of panel data that were collected in the third and fourth waves of the pandemic in Canada (n = 433), we conducted a structural equation model to test our hypotheses.
Our analysis reveals that FIW mediates the relationship between family-role overload and (1) career change intention and (2) job turnover intention. The results also indicate that the effect of family-role overload on career intentions via FIW strengthens for employees with a low ability to enact preferred boundaries.
This research shows the indirect effect of family-role overload on career intentions via FIW. This research also highlights how boundary management can buffer the effects of family-role overload on career intentions.
