Parenting Journal · Volume 1 · Issue 4 · Licensed source edition
Work–Family Boundary Fit and Employee Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Work–Family Conflict
Originally published 2025-08-19 · Behavioral Sciences
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) · DOI 10.3390/bs15081122 ↗
Working-family evidence
Work, care and the whole person.
Relevant to decisions about boundary practices that match an employee's own preferences; the original evidence concerns 420 employees in Chinese consulting firms recruited through snowball sampling.
Directly examines work and family life, parenting, caregiving or employment policies for families.
Editorial reading guide · Independence
Does the boundary I want match the boundary I can actually keep?
This reading brings fit between preferred and enacted work-family boundaries and different dimensions of wellbeing into the independence pathway. The two-wave employee survey with response-surface analysis offers a specific workplace lens on how employment and family life meet.
Study context
420 employees in Chinese consulting firms recruited through snowball sampling
Age / stage: Working adults; children not directly assessed
Read with three questions
- How did the researchers define and assess boundary preferences and boundary enactment?
- What does the study design allow us to conclude about differences among satisfaction, enthusiasm and anxiety-comfort outcomes?
- What would need to be checked before adopting boundary practices that match an employee's own preferences?
Keep the limits in view
Two-wave observational data and snowball recruitment cannot establish that changing boundary fit causes wellbeing improvements; some outcomes were not significant.
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Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.
Ying Meng; Hongying Li; Yong Qu; Guilan Yu (2025). Work–Family Boundary Fit and Employee Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Work–Family Conflict Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15081122
Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-05. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.