Feeling work at home: A transactional model of women and men’s negative affective spillover from work to family

Abstract

Guided by transactional models of emotion (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), this chapter proposes a model of negative affective work-to-family spillover. Throughout our review of the literature, we consider gender as a key antecedent that has downstream effects on the work-to-family spillover process. We begin by briefly introducing the transactional model of emotion. Next, we discuss how negative affective work-to-family spillover fits into the transactional framework and present our conceptual model. Then, we discuss person and environmental factors that may play a role in the emotion process, and consequently in affective spillover, with a specific focus on how these factors may differ for men and women. We also discuss the moderating role of the emotion process on the association between affective states at work and affective states at home. We conclude our review with suggestions for future research.