Dual‐Earner Couples’ Job Characteristic Discrepancies: Implications for Within‐Dyad Relative Work Adjustment During COVID‐19

ABSTRACT Many married couples are in a dual‐earner situation, where both partners are managing their own jobs and careers. In these families, there are likely to be times when a partner makes concessions pertaining to their own work in order to achieve a shared family objective. This was particularly true during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic when dual‐earner couples with young children suddenly found themselves managing work demands without childcare. For most couples, this required some type of work adjustment—work‐related sacrifices that hinder goal progress—to handle family responsibilities. Using a sample of 187 dual‐earner couples with young children, the present study takes a dyadic approach by considering each spouse's job characteristics as predictors of perceived relative work adjustments within the couple, and by examining the relationship between relative work adjustments and four indicators of couples’ well‐being. We used dyadic polynomial regression and response‐surface analyses to test whether differences between spouses in schedule flexibility and job role indispensability predicted their relative work adjustment, beyond the effects of each spouse's flexibility and indispensability considered separately. Findings revealed that relative work adjustments depended on consideration of one's own schedule flexibility in relation to the schedule flexibility of their spouse, such that the person with greater flexibility was perceived to have adjusted relatively more. Job role indispensability showed a similar trend, but in the opposite direction, such that spouses with greater indispensability adjusted relatively less. Moreover, the negative effects of relative work adjustment on relationship outcomes were generally stronger for women than for men.