Antecedents of Marital Happiness and Career Satisfaction: An Empirical Study of Dual-Career Managers

Sharon Jeffcoat Bartley, sbartley@utk.edu
William Judge, judge@utk.edu
Sharon Judge, shl@utk.edu
The University of Tennessee

Abstract

Work-family balance is seen as critical to life satisfaction. We study two elements of work-family balance—marital happiness and career satisfaction—for managers within dual-career families in the US, using predictive variables of negotiation skills and assistance provided from outside the couple. After controlling for age, gender, and number of children, negotiation skills were strongly predictive of marital happiness and career satisfaction. Assistance was positively related to career satisfaction, but largely unrelated to marital happiness. Based on these results, we offer practical ideas to assist managers successfully integrate work and family roles, and provide new insights for researchers to better understand work-family balance.

Introduction

As the number of dual-career couples continues to rise, issues of work and family will increasingly take on importance in our economy and in our overall society. For example, nearly half of managers in Fortune 500 companies are in dual-career families (Kossek, Noe & DeMarr, 1999). In a recent nationwide study, 83% of working mothers and 72% of working fathers reported experiencing conflict between their job demands and their desire to spend more time with their families (Galinsky, Johnson & Friedman, 1993). Clearly, work-family balance is one of the major challenges facing employees and employers in the 21^st century (Grzywacz & Bass, 2003).

Two sources of family income provide greater economic stability and greater protection against financial disaster, relieve husbands from the heavy responsibility of being sole provider for the family, and provide wives with satisfaction from work outside of the home. However, conflict over work-family demands may impact both satisfaction with one’s career as well as happiness with one’s marital role.

Conflict between work and family responsibilities has been related to inadequate performance in the work place (Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997), poor mental health (Grzywacz & Bass, 2003), family dysfunction (Coltrane, 2000), burnout (Bacharach, Bamberger, & Conley, 1991), decreased family and occupational well-being (Kinnunen & Mauno, 1998), and dissatisfaction with employment and life (Kossek & Ozeki, 1998; Netemeyer, Boles, & McMurrian, 1996). An unequal division of family work can not only affect marital happiness but also can affect individual well being, usually exhibited through an individual’s higher levels of depression and distress (Himsel & Goldberg, 2003).

Gender role ideology has been used to explain the traditional division of work—where the paid work of the marketplace was the predominantly the domain of men, and the unpaid work of the family was the primary domain of women. Work-family conflict develops when the demands of one domain conflicts with the demands of another. When women began to share the provider role by moving into the paid work of the marketplace, men were forced by necessity to assume more responsibility for the work of the family. In turn, this role shift created the necessity for balance between workplace demands and family demands. Conflict between the demands of work and family was an inevitable result as both men and women struggled to fulfill the responsibilities of these two, often-competing roles.

Several studies have found that dual-career couples share more family work than traditional, male-only “breadwinner” couples (DeMeis & Perkins, 1996; Fish, New, & Van Cleave, 1992; Greenstein, 2000; Presser, 1994; Starrells, 1994; Sullivan, 1997). However, wives in dual-career marriages typically continue to perform substantially more household labor as do their husbands in most dual-career families (Blair, 1998; Blair & Johnson, 1992; Blair & Lichter, 1991; Ferree, 1991; Hochschild, 1989; Ross, 1987; Shelton, 1991).

Although much has been learned about work-family conflict, little is known about work-family balance aside from some of the exogenous predictors of work-family imbalance (Padavic & Reskin, 2002). Furthermore, even less is known about what tactics or strategies are utilized to effectively manage work-family demands due to the serious limitation of studies that address multiple roles, whether from a balance or strain perspective, exacerbated by the inattention to connections between role enactment (e.g., behaviors linked to role) and role responsibility (e.g., taking on psychological responsibilities to a role) (Perry-Jenkins, Repetti, & Crouter, 2000). As a result, this study seeks to better understand what is work-family balance by studying two key proxies for it, as well as explore some of the behavioral tactics that are associated with these two proxies for work-family balance.

Proxies for Balance: Marital Happiness and Career Satisfaction

Marital quality and job satisfaction are inter-related, with increases in marital happiness significantly related to increases in career satisfaction, and increases in marital unhappiness significantly related to decreasing job and career satisfaction (Rogers & May, 2003). Since these two outcome measures are reasonable proxies for work-family balance within dual-career families, they will be the primary focus of this study.

Marital Happiness and Work-Family Balance in Dual-Career Families

Marital happiness can be conceptualized as the degree of personal satisfaction an individual feels about his/her marriage. It is widely believed that marital happiness is relatively high in the beginning and end of marriages, and relatively low in the middle of marriages (Cherlin, 1996). However, recent research suggests that the general trend for marital happiness is that this relationship is more negative than U-shaped, based on recent evidence from a comprehensive longitudinal panel study in the United States (Van Laningham, Johnson & Amato, 2001).

Regardless of the general life cycle of marital happiness, previous research clearly shows that marital happiness is an important ingredient for overall life satisfaction for married individuals in general, and work-family balance in particular (Nickerson, Schwarz, Diener, & Kahneman, 2003). Furthermore, marital happiness and work-family balance is not just an important goal for married individuals in the United States, but throughout the world (Keng-Howe & Liao, 1999; Spector et al., 2004).

Just as health is not the absence of disease, work-family balance is not the absence of work-family conflict. In this study, we argue that marital happiness is an important contributor to overall work-family balance and well being, similar to the work-family role synthesis argument put forth by Kossek, Noe and De Marr (1999).

Career Satisfaction and Work-Life Balance in Dual-Career Families

Early definitions of career satisfaction focused on the overall affective orientation of the individual toward his or her career (Gattiker & Larwood, 1988). However, as early as the 1970s, researchers such as Schein (1975) suggested that concerns about work and career must also include consideration of the individual’s family and the work setting. Saltzstein, Ting, and Saltzstein (2001) suggested that an employee’s satisfaction with one’s career was based on the balance s/he achieved between work and one’s personal life. Also, they stated that a number of factors may contribute to career satisfaction, but the person’s ability to balance work and personal life was vital to it. In addition to work-family balance, career satisfaction is influenced by a number of other factors including education, job stress, job satisfaction, career stage, organizational commitment, and gender (Boles, Wood, & Johnston, 2003).

With the rapid influx of women into the workforce, and persistent pay inequities between the genders, comparisons between men’s and women’s career satisfaction have proliferated. Although men and women in dual-career families were more career-satisfied than those in the traditional family (Schneer & Reitman, 1993), juggling both career and family affects men and women in different ways.

Women in families are generally less satisfied with their personal growth and their careers than men (Friedman & Greenhaus, 2000). Research often shows that women’s careers tend to take a back seat to their husbands’ careers while they focus their primary energies on the home and family (Moen & Yu, 2000). This general tendency often places restraints on career choices and opportunities for advancement and success in the world of work for women (Friedman & Greenhaus, 2000). Nevertheless, women as well as men increasingly see career satisfaction as a major factor in their assessment of work-family balance and overall life success, particularly within dual-career families (Saltzstein et al., 2001).

Antecedents of Marital Happiness and Career Satisfaction

The primary interest of this study is to determine what tactics available to practicing managers are most predictive of their marital happiness and career satisfaction. In this study, we isolated two common, but poorly understood work-life tactics for achieving better work-life balance. The two tactics are: (1) negotiation skills, and (2) paid and unpaid assistance through friends, extended family members, and hired help with household work and caregiving. Each of these tactics is discussed below in the context of how it is expected to relate to marital happiness and career satisfaction within dual-career families.

Negotiation Skills and Marital Happiness

In this study, negotiation skills are conceptualized as the process by which individuals use to resolve their differences. These processes include the ability to surface conflict in a timely fashion, and resolve conflict in a mutually beneficial way. Previous research has shown that negotiation skills are essential for success in all areas of life, including marriage (Bazerman, 1998).

One reason why negotiation skill might be positively related to marital happiness is through the sharing of financial and physical resources. Blood and Wolfe’s (1960) classic treatise   conceptualized marital power as the potential ability of one partner to influence the other’s behavior manifested through the ability to make joint decisions. In their study, power was equated with the relative resources each spouse contributed to the marriage, with greater power concomitant with greater resources. Clearly, negotiation is an area where conflicts can be discussed and resolved, and the dual-career couple can share power.

Related to this concept of resource power, Babcock and Laschever (2003) assert that negotiation is a skill most women don’t have or use to benefit themselves; they miss opportunities to negotiate, feel anxious about making demands, ask for less, have lower personal expectations, and face stiffer opposition than do men, as opposing parties tend to negotiate harder against women. However, their tendency to use integrative bargaining strategies has been found to be beneficial for all those at the bargaining table, and they are especially good negotiators when bargaining on behalf of someone else (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).

A second reason why negotiation skill might be related to marital happiness is that it can assist couples in reconciling difficult emotions, or emotional power sharing. Researchers repeatedly find that emotions of the negotiators influenced the outcomes of negotiations (Van Kleff, De Drue, & Manstead, 2004). Clearly, skill in negotiating win/win agreements within the family is more likely to lead to marital happiness than in negotiating win/lose, lose/win, or lose/lose agreements.

Related to the emotional power sharing argument above, Grote and Clark (2001) found that in periods of stress and conflict, couples tend to focus on perceptions of unfairness in the relationship that leads to, and exacerbates marital distress, as well as dissatisfaction with the marriage. However, the ability to negotiate during times of stress and conflict so that neither partner feels overburdened with the demands of home and family should be beneficial to maintain acceptable levels of marital happiness during stressful periods.

In dual-career families, time and personal energy are especially precious resources that must be negotiated well if the marriage is to succeed. Life for dual-career families is especially stressful, and is likely to bring up difficult emotions that need to be processed. When an individual has an ability to negotiate win/win agreements with his/her partner, we would expect much more commitment and happiness with their marriage than if they did not possess this skill. More formally, we hypothesize that:
 

Hypothesis 1: A manager’s negotiation skills will be positively related to his/her marital happiness within his/her dual-career family.

Negotiation Skills and Career Satisfaction

Negotiation skill has long been recognized as a critical skill for managerial success (Bazerman, 1998; Gennard, 1997). We are also learning that it is also critical to career success, especially in multi-cultural settings (Smith, 1992). Individuals increasingly must negotiate difficult trade-offs as they progress through their careers deciding on such things as domestic versus overseas work assignments, fixed versus variable compensation schemes, and full-time versus part-time educational opportunities.

Early in one’s career, an individual undergoes many personal and professional changes as the employee seeks to reconcile his/her needs with the organization’s needs. Recent research by Davey and Arnold (2000) reported that negotiation skill is a critical ability for reconciling these complex trade-offs. After getting established in one’s career, issues of identity, role and status must be tackled. Negotiation skill has long been argued to be a key determinant of successfully sorting out such issues (Blankenship, 1973). Furthermore, every individual is often confronted with unexpected crises that pit the employee’s needs and interests against the organization’s needs and interests. Once again, negotiation skill has been found to be a key source to transcend these dilemmas (Estienne, 1997).

Furthermore, managers are increasingly being asked to lead organizational change efforts so that the organization can adjust to a constantly changing environment. Recent research shows that negotiation skill is particularly important for managers as they negotiate with their families, as well as their co-workers, in adjusting to these on-going organizational changes (Buchanon, 2003). All this literature and logic suggests the following hypothesis:
 

Hypothesis 2: A manager’s negotiation skills will be positively related to his/her career satisfaction within his/her dual-career family.

Assistance and Marital Happiness

Stevens, Kinger, and Riley (2001) found the division of household tasks to play a factor in marital satisfaction. The perceived fairness in the division of household labor rather than the actual division of labor is apparently the key to the wife’s contentment (Ward, 1993) although others found that a perceived unfair division of labor decreased wives’ marital quality and led to role strain in the marriages (Frisco & Williams, 2003) and created a major source of conflict (Zang & Farley, 1995).

While there are many organizational forms of assistance available to couples to assist in household and caregiving duties, we are most interested in assistance provided by friends and family (i.e., unpaid assistance), as well as hired workers (i.e., paid assistance) because it has been less studied (Kossek et al., 1999). In The Second Shift (1989), Hochschild wrote that more affluent mothers often hire less affluent mothers or single women to work the second shift for them. However, those mothers were still required to do the planning, organizing, scheduling, supervising, hiring, and training of these paid workers that added to their family responsibilities. Hochschild (1997) also argued that unpaid assistance is “drying up” as more and more Americans join the workforce. Obviously, one’s partner can assist with household and childcare duties, but when both parents work, their time and energy have limits to what can be done outside of work demands.

Although an adaptive strategy for dual-career couples is hiring or recruiting help, households rarely have the support of a full-time homemaker, paid or unpaid (Moen & Yu, 2000). Becker and Moen (1999) reported that a few of the dual-career couples in their study relied on full-time paid childcare and other paid household services. However, this was the exception. Much more common was the family that relied on the working woman to handle some or most of the household and childcare responsibilities, while she maintained her career (Becker & Moen, 1999). Friedman and Greenhaus (2000) focused on behavioral and emotional support between spouses, and suggested that internal and external assistance was key to development of successful work/family balance amongst dual-career couples. This literature and logic suggests the following two hypotheses: 
 

Hypothesis 3a: A manager’s level of paid assistance with household duties will be positively related to his/her marital happiness within his/her dual-career family.
 

Hypothesis 3b: A manager’s level of unpaid assistance with household duties will be positively related to his/her marital happiness within his/her dual-career family.

Assistance and Career Satisfaction

Previous research has shown that work-related variables are the primary determinants of job and career satisfaction (Noor, 2003). However, with the increasing prevalence of the dual-career family, work-family situations are increasingly important predictors of career satisfaction and success (Kossek & Ozeki, 1998). If this is the case, tactics taken by managers to reduce work-family conflict through paid and unpaid assistance with household duties should lead to more satisfaction with one’s career.

There is some empirical support behind this logic. For example, Martins, Eddleston, and Viega (2002) found that the extent of community ties moderated the relationship between work-family conflict and career satisfaction. Related to that research, King, Mattimore, King and Adams (1995) found that assistance, in the form of emotional and instrumental support, positively influenced a worker’s job and career satisfaction. Finally, several studies have reported that when parents had external assistance for their children, they reported more work-family balance and greater job satisfaction (“Childcare perks,” 2002; LoJacono, 2001).

Assistance with household chores and caregiving can take many forms. In this study, we are primarily interested in external assistance provided by unpaid friends and family members, as well as paid assistance provided by more temporary workers such as nannies, housekeepers maids, and lawn services. Consistent with Hochschild’s (1997) The Time Bind hypothesis, we assume that the greater levels of paid and unpaid external assistance, the more time and energy that managers have to devote to their careers, and therefore will experience greater career satisfaction. This suggests the following hypotheses: 
 

Hypothesis 4a: A manager’s level of paid assistance with household duties will be positively related to his/her career satisfaction within his/her dual-career family.

Hypothesis 4b: A manager’s level of unpaid assistance with household duties will be        positively related to his/her career satisfaction within his/her dual-career family.

Data Analysis

Hierarchical multiple regression analysis by sets was used to ascertain the antecedents of marital happiness and career satisfaction. Previous research has shown several demographic factors reliably predict marital happiness and career satisfaction. First, an individual’s age has been shown to be positively related to marital happiness (Cherlin, 1996; Suitor, 1991; Van Laningham et al., 2001) and career satisfaction (Almeida, McDonald, & Grzywacz, 2002; Boles et al., 2003; Maume & Houston, 2001; Wilkie et al., 1998). Second, marital happiness (Himsel & Goldberg 2003; Rogers, 1996; Rogers & Amato, 2000; Staines, Pleck, Shepard, & O’Conner, 1978; Teachman, Polonko, & Scanzoni, 1999; White, Booth, & Edwards, 1986) and career satisfaction (Greenberger & O’Neil, 1990; Maume & Houston, 2001; Moen & Yu, 2000) has been shown to be negatively related to number of children in family. Finally, the individual’s gender has been repeatedly shown to be related to our two dependent variables. Specifically, women are generally less happy within marriages then men (Andersen, 1997; Dillaway & Broman, 2001; Hochschild, 1989; Menaghan & Parcel, 1990; Moen, 1992; Orbach & Custer, 1995; Rogers & Amato, 2000; Suitor, 1991; Waite, 1995); and women are generally less career satisfied (Boles et al., 2003; Friedman & Greenhaus, 2000; Kalleberg, Reskin, & Hudson, 2000; Kinnunen & Mauno, 2004; Maume & Houston, 2001). Therefore, the respondent’s age, number of children, and gender were our three control variables.

In each analysis, the three control variables were entered as a block into the regression equation first, followed by total number of hours of unpaid assistance, total number of hours of paid assistance, and negotiation skills. These models were used to predict marital happiness and career satisfaction. This methodological approach permitted isolation of the relative contributions of the significant control variables first, followed by the individual contributions of each of the assistance variables and negotiation skills variables on marital happiness and career satisfaction measures (Cohen & Cohen, 1983). In each of the analyses, the increments in variance explained were determined to assess whether the different independent measures accounted for a significant proportion of variance in the dependent measures.

Method

Data Collection and Sample

Surveys were distributed by email throughout the United States to 540 Master of Business Administration (MBA) alumni of a prominent college of business administration in a major southeastern university. The electronic surveys were returned through an automatically created and anonymous response file and were directly converted to a data file.

Inclusion criteria required that the respondents had to be employed, married, and living with a ‘significant other’ who worked outside the home. Overall, 224 MBA alumni responded to our survey request and 85 met our study’s criteria. Unfortunately, we do not know at this time as to what percentage the MBA population is employed, married, and living with their partners. Therefore, our overall effective response rate is unknown.

Of these respondents, approximately 55% were male and 45% were female. The average length of marriage was 9.4 years (SD = 8.9). The total sample had a mean age of 37.4 years (SD = 9.1). The women in the sample were on the average four years younger than the men (35.2 vs. 39.2 years old). The majority of our respondents were in the 30-40 age range. Of the respondents who had children currently living in their homes, 34.1% had one or more children between the ages of 0-5 years, 24.7% had one or more children between the ages of 6-12 years, and 12.9% had one or more children between the ages of 13-17 years. The women in the sample were more likely to have children than the men (36.8% had no children, versus 44.7% of the men).

The majority of respondents (63.5%) earned over $75,000 pre-tax yearly income, so this sample is clearly in the higher socio-economic strata of society. The total sample worked an average of 42.5 hours per week (SD = 17.0) at their jobs. Women worked an average of 37.7 hours per week (SD = 18.1) at their jobs whereas men worked an average of 46.3 hours per week (SD = 15.3). A series of independent sample t tests found that there were significant differences between males and females for age (t = -2.15, p < .05), years of marriage (t = -2.21, p < .05), and number of hours per week at their jobs (t = -2.38, p < .05). Thus women tended to be younger, married fewer years, and worked fewer hours per week outside of the home than men within our sample.

Variables and Measures         

Assistance. The paid and unpaid assistance measure was modified from measures of household labor used in the National Survey of Families and Households (Sweet, Bumpass, & Call, 1988). Subjects reported on the number of hours per week they, their partners, extended family members/friends, and/or paid workers spent on household tasks divided into three categories (household tasks such as preparing meals, cleaning house, grocery shopping and washing clothes; household tasks such as yard work, paying bills, and maintaining automobiles; and caregiving tasks for children or elders who are your responsibility). Unpaid assistance was operationalized as the number of hours per week that some friend or extended family member provided to the household (e.g., cleaning, yard work, babysitting) without any financial payment. Paid assistance was operationalized as the number of hours per week that some hired help provided to the household (e.g., maid service, mowing service, childcare service) in turn for financial payment.

Marital Happiness. The measure of marital happiness was captured by an eight-item scale developed by Voydanoff and Donnelly (1999). The measure asked how happy the respondents are with aspects of their relationship with responses that ranged from 1 (very happy) to 7 (very unhappy). Previous research indicated an internal consistency of the scale (computed using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha) of .90 for women and .89 for men (Voydanoff & Donnelly, 1999); in the present study, an alpha of .87 was obtained. The complete scale can be found in the Appendix.

Career Satisfaction. Career satisfaction was measured with a five-item scale developed by Greenhaus, Parasuraman, and Wormley (1990). Responses ranged from 1 (strongly agree) to 5  (strongly disagree) and were averaged to produce a total career satisfaction score. Previous research indicated an internal consistency of the scale of .88 computed using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha (Greenhaus et al., 1990). In the present study, an alpha of .89 was obtained. The complete scale can be found in the Appendix.

Negotiation Skills. Couples’ negotiation skills were measured using the third subscale of the Kansas Marital Conflict Scales, a 37-item scale consisting of three subscales designed to measure wives’ perceptions of the stages of marital conflict based on Gottman’s work. The sub-scales—agenda-building, arguing, and negotiation—correspond to each stage of conflict, and were developed as an alternative means to collect information about marital conflict without the expense of observation methods originally used by Gottman (Touliatos, Perlmutter & Straus, 1990). Cronbach’s alpha reported by the authors for each of the subscales ranged from .83 to .96 (Eggeman, Moxley, & Schumm, 1985, cited in Touliatos et al., 1990). The third subscale was used in this study to measure negotiation skills and consisted of 11 items. Responses ranged from 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always). In this study, a Cronbach’s alpha of .90 was obtained for the negotiation subscale. The subscale can be found in the Appendix.

Controls. Three control variables in this study—age, gender, and number of children—were self-reported through single-item measures in the survey. The number of children was defined as the number of children under the ages of 18 who are currently living within the family household.

Results

Descriptive statistics for the two dependent and six predictor variables are listed in Table 1. The only significant inter-correlation between the predictor variables is between age and gender (r = .23, p < .05) indicating that the men in our sample tended to be older than the women. In retrospect, this is logical given the fact that only recently have women sought MBA degrees in large numbers. Nonetheless, we conducted a test for multicollinearity to verify the independence of the predictor variables. We found that the overall tolerance factor was close to 1.00 so we concluded that there is little evidence for multicollinearity amongst our data.

Table 2 presents the results of the hierarchical regression analysis ascertaining the antecedents of marital happiness. As can be seen in Table 2, this regression was significant (F = 7.04, p < .001). Notably, the three control variables were not related to marital happiness for our sample. As predicted, negotiation skills were positively related to marital happiness (t = 5.87, p < .001) providing rather strong support for the first hypothesis. After controlling for the demographic variables, paid assistance, unpaid assistance, and negotiation skills accounted for a statistically significant 39% of the variance in the marital happiness scores.

Hypothesis 3a and 3b stated that there would be a positive relationship between paid and unpaid assistance to marital happiness. The results did not support our hypotheses as paid assistance was negatively related to marital happiness (t = -1.94, p < .10), and unpaid assistance was found to be unrelated to marital happiness (Table 2, model 2). Therefore, we found no support for our third hypothesis.

Table 3 shows the results of the hierarchical regression analysis ascertaining the antecedents of career satisfaction. Once more, the regression was significant (F = 2.08, p < .01). Again, the three control variables showed no relationship to career satisfaction, our outcome variable in this case. Similar to the previous results, negotiation skills were positively related to our criterion variable (t = 2.07, p < .05) offering support for hypothesis 2. With all predictor variables in the equation, paid assistance, unpaid assistance, and negotiation skills accounted for 9% of the variance in career satisfaction. Interestingly, both unpaid assistance (t = 1.79, p < .05) and paid assistance (t = 1.54, p < .10) were positively related to career satisfaction. Thus, hypothesis 4 a and 4 b was supported.

Discussion

Overall, this study systematically examined the two prominent, but understudied behavioral tactics (i.e., negotiation skills and extra-familial assistance), and their respective relationships with marital happiness and career satisfaction. Regarding the first tactic, the results from this study yielded rather robust evidence demonstrating a positive relationship between negotiation skills and both marital happiness and career satisfaction. More specifically, respondents reporting relatively effective negotiation skills indicated greater degrees of marital happiness and career satisfaction compared to respondents possessing less effective negotiation skills.               

This finding suggests that negotiation skills are not only an essential skill for professional but also personal success. Previous research has shown that there are gender differences that affect negotiation tactics (Stevens, Bavetta & Gist, 1993). However, there is little disagreement that negotiation skill is essential to being an effective manager for either gender (Gennard, 1997; Lublin, 2003). This study refines and extends the negotiation literature into the private sphere of managers’ personal lives where negotiation skill appears to be an essential tactic if a manager seeks to achieve better work/life balance in the form of marital happiness and career satisfaction.

A second tactic explored in this study is the utilization of paid and unpaid assistance provided by friends, extended family members, and hired help for household and caregiving. Interestingly, paid assistance was marginally and negatively related to marital happiness, which was counter to our hypothesis, but it was positively related to career satisfaction in support of our hypothesis. While the positive relationship with career satisfaction was expected, we can only speculate why paid assistance might be negatively related to marital happiness.

One possible explanation for this counter-intuitive negative relationship between paid assistance and marital happiness is that when outsiders are hired to take care of the household chores and/or provide caregiving to children or elders, the dual-career married couple somehow feels less committed to the marriage and family. Previous research by Spitze and Loscocco (2000) found that housework and caregiving are activities that can paradoxically provide pleasure to married couples, even when that work is not pleasurable in and of itself. Thus, the sacrifice involved in personally performing housework and caregiving is often associated with greater marital happiness.

A second possible explanation is more utilitarian and less psycho-social in nature. Paid assistance costs money, and it is well known that financial strains hamper marital happiness. Indeed, Iceland and Kim (2001) reported that paid assistance affects the family’s financial well-being that in turn affects the couple’s marital happiness when the couple is at or near the poverty line set by society. It may be that managers are paying for services that they cannot comfortably afford, and that this is creating unique pressures and strains in the marriage; however, given their reported earnings, this appears unlikely. Regardless of the reason, we clearly need additional study of the relationship between assistance and marital happiness.

Finally, some discussion on the lack of predictive ability of our three control variables is in order. Previous research has shown that a person’s age, gender, and number of children under the age of 18 are predictive of marital happiness and career success. However, in our study, none of our controls were systematically associated with either of our two dependent variables. It may be that our sample is substantively different from previous studies.

In other words, our data may be more biased than previous studies, or it may be more up to date and current than previous research on marital happiness and career satisfaction for married and employed professional managers. For example, Sturges and Guest (2004) recently found that number of children was unrelated to work family balance for younger workers. Similarly, Walker (1990) argued that work-family balance is harder to achieve for professional women than working class women because professional women expect to achieve meaning out of their careers as well as their families, while working-class women only expect meaning out of their families. Thus, our focus exclusively on professional managers in dual-career marriages may lead to different conclusions than studies of the general population, or studies of working-class couples. This is interesting, and requires further study on broader samples.

Finally, Elloy and Mackie (2002) reported that dual-career professional couples have a much more complex challenge to achieve work-family balance than those individuals in more traditional marriages, and that unpaid assistance through family and friends was found to be unrelated to work-family conflict. As such, work-family balance is a complex and evolving phenomena that is different for different classes and sectors of society.

Limitations

Generalization of findings should be undertaken with caution for several reasons. First, this is not a random sample of all professional married couples throughout the United States, but rather a convenience sample of MBA graduates from a particular southeastern university. While the graduates currently reside throughout the United States, the southeastern United States was over-represented. In addition, not all other managers possess MBA degrees. Furthermore, sources and reconciliation of work-family conflict have been found to vary by national culture (Spector et al., 2004). Consequently, there might be a geographic and/or educational bias to our data.

Second, this data is cross-sectional in nature. While we theorize that these variables are antecedents of marital happiness and career satisfaction, it is quite possible marital happiness and/or career satisfaction lead to improved negotiation skills and paid and unpaid assistance. Future research needs to longitudinally explore these relationships over time.

Third, all of this data is self-assessed, similar to most other work-family balance studies. While these measures come from reliable and valid previous research, these data may suffer from mono-method bias. As such, it would be interesting and valuable to have the marital partners assess their own partner’s negotiation skills and separately validate the assistance levels that were declared by their spouses.

Conclusions

Despite these limitations, this study refines and extends the work-family balance theory and research into a new area of study for married, professional managers in dual-career families. We found that effective negotiation skills are not only imperative to professional success, but also appear to be essential to successful work-family balance (as represented by marital success and career satisfaction). In addition, we found that paid and unpaid assistance to perform household and caregiving tasks are positively related to career satisfaction, but generally unrelated to marital happiness.

Overall, behavioral tactics taken amongst professional managers in dual-career marriages to achieve work-family balance is a relatively under explored, but very important area of management research (Kossek et al., 1999). It is our hope that this modest empirical study contributes to our understanding and stimulates additional research into this new world of managers and their families in the 21^st century.

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