Harmful help: the costs of backing-up behavior in teams.

Prior research on backing-up behavior has indicated that it is beneficial to teams (C. O. L. H. Porter, 2005; C. O. L. H. Porter et al., 2003). This literature has focused on how backing-up behavior aids backup recipients in tasks in which workload is unevenly distributed among team members. The authors of the present study examined different contexts of workload distribution and found that, in addition to the initial benefits to backup recipients, there are initial and subsequent costs. Backing-up behavior leads backup providers to neglect their own taskwork, especially when workload is evenly distributed. Team members who receive high amounts of backing-up behavior decrease their taskwork in a subsequent task, especially when a team member can observe their workload. These findings indicate that it is important to consider both the benefits and costs of engaging in backing-up behavior.

When can employees have a family life? The effects of daily workload and affect on work-family conflict and social behaviors at home.

This article presents a longitudinal examination of antecedents and outcomes of work-to-family conflict. A total of 106 employees participating in an experience-sampling study were asked to respond to daily surveys both at work and at home, and their spouses were interviewed daily via telephone for a period of 2 weeks. Intraindividual analyses revealed that employees' perceptions of workload predicted work-to-family conflict over time, even when controlling for the number of hours spent at work. Workload also influenced affect at work, which in turn influenced affect at home. Finally, perhaps the most interesting finding in this study was that employees' behaviors in the family domain (reported by spouses) were predicted by the employees' perceptions of work-to-family conflict and their positive affect at home.