As the advent of information and communication technologies facilitates employees’ interactions with families beyond the domestic sphere, family resources and demands play a significant role in shaping employee work outcomes. We adopted a cross-domain perspective to introduce a new construct, “work-oriented family crafting (WOFC)”—self-initiated changes that employees make in their own family demands and family resources to attain and/or optimize their work goals. In Study 1, we developed a measure of WOFC using three distinct samples totaling 716 participants from diverse occupational and industrial backgrounds. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-dimensional structure of the WOFC construct: approaching family resources and avoiding family demands. In Study 2, we examined the antecedents and consequences of WOFC through a sample of 231 pairs of job incumbents and their spouses. Our results showed that family interaction quality positively predicted approaching family resources, which in turn, was associated with increased positive family-to-work spillover. Both family interaction quality and segmentation preference positively predicted avoiding family demands, and this crafting behavior was related to increased task performance and decreased negative family-to-work spillover. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings accordingly.
