The Department of Human Resource Management Launched the Brand Academic Activity, "Journey with You"

On the afternoon of September 6, 2024, BNUBS held the academic seminar "Journey with You" in the conference room 1722 of the Rear Main Building. Xu Zhixing, Head of the Department of Human Resources Management, and Shang Zhe, Associate Professor of the School of Government Management, attended the meeting. This event attracted more than a dozen undergraduate and doctoral students from BNUBS, the School of Government Management, and the School of Labor and Personnel Management of Renmin University of China.

"Journey with You" is a management literature seminar hosted by Mr. Cai Zijun from the Department of Human Resource Management. Through the weekly study of top management journal articles, the activity brought teachers and students closer in a relaxed and pleasant academic atmosphere, and improved students' scientific research ability in a quiet way. The activity of "Journey with you" was a good attempt for the School to cultivate high-quality top-notch talents, and provided a new idea for different majors of the School to carry out students' academic ability improvement education.

This time, the seminar revolved around recent developments in work-family conflict (WFC) that were recently published in JAP as well as JOB. Teacher Cai Zijun first introduced the concept of work-family conflict (WFC), pointing out that it is rooted in the multiple roles of individuals in the life space and the incompatibility between roles and responsibilities. He then posed a central question: "Does WFC cause increased stress, or does increased stress exacerbate WFC?" This "chicken or egg" question sparked a lot of interest from the participants.

In response to this problem, Cai introduced a paper published in JOB in 2023： Energy, attentional resources and work-family conflict over the meso-term: Resource Loss Spirals Revisited. The paper challenges the current rational view of resource conservation, finding that it is resource reduction that leads to WFC, not WFC, in the medium term.

Mr. Cai pointed to a recent paper published in JAP: Work - Family Conflict and Strain: Revisiting Theory, Direction of Causality, and Longitudinal Dynamism. On this basis, the relationship between WFC and stress is further explored. The article asks, existing studies have found that WFC persists for a long time, so what is the reason for this existence? Is it the cumulative effect of resources on WFC, or is it the effect of other stable long-term factors? Is the causal relationship between WFC and stress different on different time scales? Based on 5 samples of different time lengths, RI-CLMP method was used to disentangle intra-individual and inter-individual relationships. This paper found that for the relationship between WFC and stress, intra-individual changes were basically negligible, and the main variation came from long-term inter-individual differences. This poses a further challenge to the theory of resource conservation and provides stronger support for the theory of adaptation.

Teacher Cai pointed out that this paper is based on a clear research tradition, which gives a detailed explanation of the time effect, uses a reasonable and rigorous method to conduct an in-depth and detailed test of the theory, helps us better understand the relationship between variables under different time perspectives, shows how to achieve the matching of questions and methods, and how to ask good questions.

In the discussion session of the lecture, the teachers and students showed great enthusiasm and conducted in-depth discussions on theoretical hypotheses, research methods and data analysis in the literature. Many students raised specific questions about the relationship between WFC and stress, and shared their own views and insights. Teacher Cai Zijun responded one by one, and the atmosphere was very warm. In the end, Teacher Cai Zijun summarized the sharing content of the day, and looked forward to the future research direction, saying that he will continue to bring more cutting-edge research to share.

Contributed by Department of Human Resources Management

Edited by Xu Zhixing

Reviewed by Wei Hao