Influence That Follows You Home: Two Pathways from Leader Dominance and Prestige to Work–Family Conflict and Enrichment

Abstract: Work increasingly extends into employees’ personal lives, yet research on work–family outcomes has focused largely on job characteristics and individual differences, paying less attention to everyday social interactions at work. We examine leadership as a proximal social mechanism of work–home spillover. Integrating dual-strategies theory with the work–home resources model, we propose that leaders’ dominance- and prestige-based influence shape employees’ work–family conflict and enrichment through two pathways: supervisor-directed exemplification (behavioral) and job satisfaction (affective). We test this model across two preregistered field studies: a three-wave survey of full-time employees and a 10-day daily diary study with employee–partner dyads. Across both studies, leader dominance is associated with greater work–family conflict primarily via increased exemplification, whereas leader prestige is associated with greater work–family enrichment primarily via higher job satisfaction. These findings show that how leaders secure deference shapes employees’ home lives in systematically different ways. 

Keywords: Work-family conflict, work-family enrichment, dominance, prestige, exemplification, field study