The bright and dark sides of helping and being helped at work for family functioning

Using the Work-Home Resources (W-HR) model as an overarching theoretical framework, we seek to examine how the interplay between employees’ enactment and receipt of interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB-I) affects two important family outcomes (family performance and marital withdrawal behavior). We simultaneously test resource depletion (via exhaustion) and resource generation (via personal accomplishment) as mechanisms underlying the spillover of the interactive effects of OCB-I enactment and receipt to the family domain. Based on a three-wave, dual-source study of 320 employees, we found that OCB-I enactment is positively related to both exhaustion (only for those who themselves receive low OCB-Is from colleagues) and personal accomplishment at work (regardless of OCB-I receipt), which interfere with and enrich employees’ family lives, respectively. We discuss how these findings contribute to research on organizational citizenship behaviors and the W-HR literature, as well as their practical implications.