"There are countless studies on the negative spillover of job pressures on family life, but few on how job satisfaction enhances the quality of family life"
About this Quote
Bandura is flipping the usual script of work-life research with a psychologist's quiet provocation: our obsession with damage has become its own kind of blind spot. By opening with "countless studies", he’s not just citing a literature; he’s indicting a habit. Social science, like news, is drawn to pathology because harms are legible, measurable, and morally urgent. But that tilt can smuggle in a bleak assumption: work is primarily a toxin that seeps into the home, and family life is mainly where we tally the costs.
The subtext is classic Bandura. His career centered on agency, self-efficacy, and the feedback loops between environment and belief. In that frame, job satisfaction isn’t a soft perk; it’s a psychological resource that changes behavior: more patience, more attentiveness, more willingness to invest in relationships, more confidence that carries across domains. He’s pointing to positive spillover as a missing mechanism, not a motivational poster.
Context matters here: late 20th-century industrial and organizational psychology, alongside work-family scholarship, often treated stress as the explanatory engine. Bandura is pushing for a more balanced causal map. If we only study breakdown, we design interventions that merely contain harm (flex-time, stress management) instead of building conditions for flourishing (autonomy, mastery, recognition, fair treatment). His intent is to redirect attention from coping to cultivating: not "How do we stop work from ruining families?" but "What kinds of work make people better at being with the people they love?"
The subtext is classic Bandura. His career centered on agency, self-efficacy, and the feedback loops between environment and belief. In that frame, job satisfaction isn’t a soft perk; it’s a psychological resource that changes behavior: more patience, more attentiveness, more willingness to invest in relationships, more confidence that carries across domains. He’s pointing to positive spillover as a missing mechanism, not a motivational poster.
Context matters here: late 20th-century industrial and organizational psychology, alongside work-family scholarship, often treated stress as the explanatory engine. Bandura is pushing for a more balanced causal map. If we only study breakdown, we design interventions that merely contain harm (flex-time, stress management) instead of building conditions for flourishing (autonomy, mastery, recognition, fair treatment). His intent is to redirect attention from coping to cultivating: not "How do we stop work from ruining families?" but "What kinds of work make people better at being with the people they love?"
Quote Details
| Topic | Work-Life Balance |
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