Copreneurs and communication: Work-family balance in married couples' family businesses.

摘要

In this mixed methods study, the relational dialectics perspective, boundary theory, and work-family border theory were applied to test the hypotheses and answer the research questions with regard to copreneurs' communicative practices and workfamily balance efforts. First, copreneurial couples (N=105 dyads) were surveyed about their communication behavior and workfamily practices with regard to their personal and professional relationship with their spouse. Actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) analyses were conducted on the quantitative data to account for the interdependent nature of the copreneurial relationship. Once the quantitative data was analyzed, face-to-face interviews were conducted with a subsample (n=20 dyads) of participants. Thematic analysis was utilized to interpret the qualitative data.;Findings suggest that the more copreneurs successfully negotiate the dialectical tensions in their relationship, the higher levels of work-family balance and relationship satisfaction they report, and the less copreneurs successfully negotiate the dialectical tensions in their relationship, the lower levels of work-family balance and relationship satisfaction they report. APIM analyses reveal that the relationship between husbands' relationship satisfaction and work-family balance is significant when their partner (wife) is high in relationship satisfaction, but is not significant when their partner is low in relationship satisfaction. Thus, when wives have high relationship satisfaction, husbands will have more work-family balance as their own relationship satisfaction increases. Additionally, results suggest that copreneurs have a preference for talking about work in the family domain (and less for talking about family when at work), as well as having flexibility to attend to family matters at work (rather than work matters at home).;Copreneurs revealed the communicative advantages of copreneurship as including: greater understanding of the partner's perspective, trust, sharing the good with the bad, togetherness, and 100% commitment. Copreneurs indicated that the communicative disadvantages to copreneurship include: arguments and/or stress from work and not having enough downtime. The complete results of the analysis are reported. The findings of this study suggest what communicative practices that copreneurs use in attempting to balance their work and family lives, including those practices that make their business run more efficiently and those that are used to maintain a satisfactory personal relationship.