Marital satisfaction affects workplace creativity, religious homogamy and forgiveness

Marital satisfaction affects workplace creativity: Religious Homogamy and Forgiveness Le Ngoc Anh Khoa To Nguyen Chi Hieu Tran Tien Khoa International University, Vietnam National University-HCMC, Vietnam Abstract To understand more how significantly the married life can affect the workplace creativity through the theory of family-work enrichment, religious homogamy and forgiveness are selected as two main factors to investigate how marital satisfaction can affect workplace creativity through the spillover of psychological resources from family to work After collecting the data of 209 people who have husband/wife, the data shows the positive relationship among religious homogamy and forgiveness to the marital satisfaction Religious homogamy is also stressed as the most pronounced when the spouses satisfied with their marriage Besides, the result also demonstrates the significant of marital satisfaction indirectly effect the workplace creativity through the family-work resources spillover Overall, the research shows that the creativity of employees can be influenced by their marriage which can be affected by religious homogamy and forgiveness Keywords: religious homogamy, forgiveness, marital satisfaction, family, workplace Introduction Research background Creativity is a skill that plays as an important role for companies and organizations While working, creativity can be used to predict the future of that organization whether it can be success or not (Tierney, Pamela, Steven M Farmer, and George B Graen, 1999) Besides, creativity is also used to measure the development of emotion and the relationship among employees in company (Russ, Sandra W, 1998) When the working environment change, creativity is also the must-have skill to adapt to the new situations (George J M., 2007) Thus, understanding what factors influent employee’s creativity is extremely essential Therefore, researchers always try to figure out the key lead to the creativity of employees There are a lot of elements that can affect individual creativity such as creative personality (Zhou, Jing, and Greg R Oldham, 2001) Besides, individual creativity is also reflected through the growth-need strength (Shalley, Christina E., Jing Zhou, and Greg R Oldham., 2004) and other factors which were proved by numerous of researchers However, it seems that a good marriage also provides sources for creativity which is related to emotion, motivation and energy (Heller, Daniel, and David Watson, 2005) Religion is one of the important factors that can decide whether spouses can solve their own problems (Lambert, Nathaniel M., and David C Dollahite, 2006) and it also affects the communication between them (Hughes, Patrick C., and Fran C Dickson, 2005) Besides religion, other papers also show that forgiveness can affect spouse’s satisfaction because it can built the trust and the loyalty between spouse (Olson, Jonathan R., et al., 2015) Hence, this research digs deeper in some aspects that can affect the marital satisfaction which are religious homogamy and forgiveness and figure out how marriage can affect the employee’s creativity 84 Divorce rate in Vietnam is quite high and increases year by year In 2014, there were 60,000 cases of divorcing and it took 25% comparing with marriage rate This means four pares get marriage, one pare will go to the court to divorce Most spouses experience an unsatisfied marriage which lead to their divorce decision Religious and forgiveness are factors that can lead to the end of a marriage Besides, in Ho Chi Minh city, numerous of multinational companies are located, which require high level of experience as well as creativity in working Opposite to the target of those companies, according to giaoduc.net, young Vietnamese employees are too mechanically Instead of creating new ways of working, Vietnamese chooses copying and becoming followers Thus, this research aims to examines (1) How significant religious homogamy and forgiveness affect marital satisfaction; (2) identify the effect of marital satisfaction on the psychological resources generated (3) investigate the influence of family-work resource spillover on creativity; Literature review Relationship between Religion and Marriage There are numerous researches proved that religion can affect the satisfaction of a marriage The study of (Schumm, Walter R., Stephan R Bollman, and Anthony P Jurich , 1982) showed that religion are very important between spouse and it totally can affect their marriage Then, this idea is also supported by (Wilson, Margaret R., and Erik E Filsinger, 1986) that everything is related to religion can affect many faces of a marriage including spouse’s point of view And according to the study of (Olson, Jonathan R., et al., 2015), having the same religion is very meaningful for the satisfaction of a marriage The marriage is more stable if spouses have the same religion because they join the same religious activities which make them have the same perception about every problem Thus, this is an important factor that can decrease the rate of divorces among coupes and increase the satisfaction between them Therefore, this research expects that the higher Religious Homogamy is, the higher Marital Satisfaction Relationship between Forgiveness and Marriage The research of (Lin, Wei-Fen, et al, 2004) showed that forgiveness can create positive emotion because it can decrease the negative feeling such as irritability and worry Forgiveness also plays a role as the base for a marriage which encourage spouses trust and loyal to each other (Marks, Loren D., Wesley R Burr, and Randal D Day, 2012) This idea is also supported by (Olson, Jonathan R., et al., 2015) that the forgiveness can lead to the sympathy between couples which can gain the trust and loyalty from each other Therefore, this research expects that the high of forgiveness is, the higher of marital satisfaction Relationship between Marriage and Psychological Resources According to the study of (Ten Brummelhuis, Lieke L., Jarrod M Haar, and Maree Roche, 2014), the idea is studying about how the negative as well as the positive psychological resources coming from family can affect the leaders The negative resources stand for all pressure bearing from home which make a person feel tired, depress and exhausted On the other hand, positive resources create fresh feeling and more creative for a new day When the leaders experienced the bad feeling generated at home, the followers can realize easily through leaders’ reactions Thus, gradually, the negative feelings from the leader spread to the followers in workplace The result of the study shows that the leaders totally are beneficial from the positive psychological resources generated at home because they are always in good mood which can motivate others On the other hand, negative psychological resources will put others in pressure which will affect the working performance as well as the creativity in workplace Then, the research of (Tang, Yipeng, Xu Huang, and Yongli Wang., 2017) also support the previous theory The research proved that a good marriage can bring more effects for working people Those effects become a source of emotion and energy for people who experience it After researching, 85 they realize good marriage make people more self-reliant as well as optimistic than others Then, they go to work with full energy and have enough confidence to solve every problem when it come Therefore, this research expects that high marital satisfaction positively lead to high familywork resources spillover Relationship between Psychological Resources and Creativity The work of (Ford, 1996) proved that psychological improve the performance in working by ideas and innovations popping up while working Then, the work of (Fredrickson, 2001) also support the idea He showed that these resources can affect the thought and action of a person That person can increase his awareness and think out many new ideas and solutions in diversify faces of a problem For the research of (Tang, Yipeng, Xu Huang, and Yongli Wang., 2017), they concluded that psychological resources is needed for less creative person This resource will help and support them through their daily action and through which can increase the working performance of those people Therefore, this research expects that high level of family-work resources spillover is related to high level of creativity Methodology Due to the context of the study, this research will apply quantitative method to solve issues related to statistic, mathematic Research model will be established after clearing all information about research problems and research questions Measurement scale will be constructed Pilot test will be run first to ensure that respondents can understand clearly about the survey Then, questionnaires will be changed Real survey will be transferred to companies, organization, schools, offices After 2-4 weeks, data will be collected Basing on raw data, data analysis will be performed to deeply understand about respondents’ choices Sample Profile and Data Collection The target for this research will be employees, workers, staffs who are in marriage in Ho Chi Minh City Around 200 people will be the target for this sample size Development of Measures Research instruments: Likert scale from to will be applied in survey when collect data Each point of scale will be explained more in survey After pilot test, the questionnaires may be changed to ensure the respondents can understand clearly about the survey Data collection: Surveys will be applied to collect data from the target They will be transferred to schools, offices and companies After – weeks, they will be collected and selected Selected surveys will be entered into Excel to perform data analysis The measurement scale [shown in Table 1] Results Questionnaires were sent directly to suitable targets 209 answers were collected Surveys are collected randomly As shown in the Table 2, male respondents occupied 40.7% while female respondents were 59.3% Basing on the sample size of 209, respondents who are from 20 to 35 years old, took off 35.9% Respondents who are from 36-45 years old are 40.7% and the rest are 23.4% of respondents who are above 46 years old Reliability test To test internal consistency reliability of the measurement model,we used cronbach’s alpha criteria with reference to Anderson and Gerbing (1988) EXP1 and QUAL4 violate the rule of Field (2005) as their “Cronbach's alpha if item deleted” values are higher than the overall Cronbach's alpha, thus they were 86 removed from the measurement model [See Table 3] The result of reliability test after removing inappropriate items well supported the internal consistency reliability of measurement model Preliminary analyses of empirical data The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity were conducted to assess sampling adequacy and examine whether factor analysis applies to the measurement A total of 23 items contributes to the KMO values of 0.891 at a significant level of 0.000, which exceeds the meritorious threshold of 0.80 (Kaiser, 1974), therefore appeared to be applicable for further analysis Common bias method As both dependent and independent variables were taken from the same respondent doing self-administered survey might result in the inflated relationship between variable, also known as common method bias (Podsakoff, & Organ, 1986; Conway, & Lance, 2010) To detect the potential of common method bias, we conducted Harman’s single-factor test (Podsakoff, & Organ, 1986) with an approach of unrotated maximum likelihood analysis extracting all variables into one factor The single factor only covers 29.23% of the whole variance, which is less than 50% Thus the probability that a substantial common method bias occurs is low Measurement model evaluation At the initial stage, we measured the validity and reliability of measurement model both with Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) As the measurement items were adopted and modified from prior studies, an EFA approach of maximum likelihood analysis with eigenvalues greater than through Promax rotation for 20 measured items was conducted Concerning Fabrigar, Wegener, MacCallum, and Strahan (1999), maximum likelihood best suits data relatively normally distributed The result of pattern matrix categorized 23 items into six distinct components [see Table 4] None of the factors loaded under the value of 0.5 meets the requirement of Hair, Anderson, Tatham and Black (1998) Besides, there is no items having a value of loading value minus crossing value greater than 0.3 Therefore, it is unnecessary to delete any items Then, we used the determinant of the matrix as a criterion to test for multicollinearity As the determinant value of 23-item matrix is 0.000021, greater than the threshold of 0.00001 recommended by Field (2005), multicollinearity is not a problem for these data Furthermore, the data highly met the requirement of Anderson and Gerbing (1988) that total variance explained was 57.29%, higher than recommended of 50% Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Next, we conducted CFA by AMOS software version 20 to firstly examine the consistency within measured constructs using model fit indices and further assess measurement model’s validity Model fit The results demonstrated that the measurement model fits the data well at p=0.000: the ratio of chi-square test size and number of degrees of freedom [χ2/d.f.] = 1.42, root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.03, standardized root mean square residual [SRMR] = 0.02, normed fit index [NFI] = 0.92, goodness of fit index [GFI] = 0.93, and comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.98 (Carmines, & McIver, 1981) The measures of overall fit meet conventional standards Hence, the measurement model met the requirement of absolute fit, incremental fit, and parsimonious fit The validity of measurement model All 23 items loaded significantly into proper constructs at p < 0.001 and their value of Standardized Regression Weights are all greater than 0.5, which indicates the convergent validity exists (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988; Hair, Bush, & Ortinau, 2006) With reference to Fornell and Larcker (1981), the square root of each AVE in each variable [written in bold in the matrix diagonal of Table 5] is greater in all cases than the other correlation values among the latent variables [written in off-diagonal elements in their corresponding row and column] Therefore, the discriminant validity of the measurement scale is also verified Besides, for all constructs, the composite reliability exceeds the threshold value of 0.7 (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988) Following Bagozzi and Yi (1988), we verified convergent validity for a reflective measurement model by 87 evaluating the average variance extracted (AVE) of each latent variable instead of using items’ loadings and cross-loadings All of the AVE values [shown in Table 5] are greater than the acceptable threshold of 0.5, so convergent validity is confirmed With reference to Fornell and Larcker (1981), the square root of each AVE in each variable, written in bold in the matrix diagonal of Table 5, is greater in all cases than the off-diagonal elements in their corresponding row and column, supporting the discriminant validity Besides, Sweeney and Soutar (2001) suggested that the discriminant validity is also assured if correlations between pairs of variables are significantly below one As the square root of AVE [shown in Table 5] is verified for all pairs, so the discriminant validity is also confirmed Therefore, the validity and reliability of measurement scale is confirmed Structural model evaluation For this study, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was applied in-depth to examine the hypothesized causal relationship between latent constructs as well as their significance level (Hair et al., 1998) Before conducting SEM, we first assess the structural model’s overall model fit indices to estimate the strength of relationships among scale items and latent constructs Model fit The overall result is significant and shows good fit indices: [Chi-square] = 457.582; [χ2/d.f.] = 1.182 (< 3); [GFI] = 0.906 (>0.9); [TLI] = 0.927 (>0.9); [CFI] = 0.936 (>0.9), and [RMSEA] = 0.024 (PI, TRUST->CRED, HOM->CRED, QUA->PI are all less than 0.05 Especially, with regard to CRED->PI, TRUST->CRED, and QUA->PI, all of the p-values are highly significant at a confidence level of 99.9% Furthermore, all estimate weights are positive; hence these proved to be positive byrelationships are the data H1, H3, H4, H7 are therefore supported The statistics in Table also reveal that regarding the strength of relationships on CRED, TRUST shows the strongest positive effect (0.556) highly significant under the confidence level of 99.9% In the contrary, p-values of two paths, namely EXP->CRED and QUA->CRED, are greater than 0.05, which indicates the significance under the confidence level of 95% Consequently, H2, H6 are not supported by data Conclusions Religious Homogamy The outcome shows that Religious Homogamy strongly affects spouses’ Marital Satisfaction with β = 0.375 Religion is the same as a habit living in a person’s blood It even affects every choice in daily life For spouses, their religion will be experienced clearly by their partner Thus, to have a good marriage, two people must have the same thought about the religion they are bearing This religion will stand for many decisions and through in their daily life Then, they can reduce the chance that arguments will occur Problems can also be solved with the satisfaction receiving from both sides Forgiveness Although Forgiveness is deleted from the model, basing on the data, it still positively affects the Marital Satisfaction with β = 0.128 This index is much lower than Religious Homogamy because it received a lot of 88 opposite through Most spouses will forgive each other and hope their partner will be better in the future However, this through much depends on the situation and how serious the mistake is If the mistakes are too serious that can affect the honor and dignity of the other, there will be no forgiveness Marital Satisfaction The outcome shows that Religious Homogamy mainly influences marital Satisfaction Besides, Marital Satisfaction strongly links to Family-Work Resource Spillover with β = 0.625 This factor is also a prefix that will lead to the Creativity in workplace Marriages will generate all energy and emotion to become an invisible resource This resource may be negative or positive depend on whether the marriage good or bad Family-Work Resource Spillover Family-Work Resource Spillover positively affect the Creativity of employees in workplace with β = 0.347 This means that if the Marital Satisfaction is good, positive resource will be generated which will make employees more creative and vice versa This proved that the husband/wife of a person will indirectly affect the way a person work which show how important the role of family and marriage are The significance of the study and practical implication The finding shows that spouses that having the same religious faith and beliefs will experience a marriage with full of satisfaction Besides, the study also stresses that, the emotion and energy generated (psychological resources – in another way) at home will strongly affect the creativity of employees in workplace All evidences prove that marriage is playing the role of a source of intelligent inspiration The research also emphasizes that employees will be influenced by their social-relation life of employees outside the organization and company Thus, to improve employees’ performance, organizations and companies should care more about the psychological experience of their employees through their social relationship which have not 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The Journal of Creative Behavior 35.3 (2001): 151-167 International Journal of Information Acknowledgement It is acknowledged that this work is not supported by any funding organizations Table 1: Measurement scale Variables Religious homogamy Code RH1 RH2 RH3 RH4 Forgiveness Marital satisfaction F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 MS1 MS2 MS3 MS4 MS5 Family–work resource spillover FW1 FW2 FW3 Creativity C1 C2 C3 C4 Table Socio-demographic profile of the respondents Category Nationality Vietnamese Age 25-35 36-45 Above 46 Gender Male Female N=209 Table The result of Reliability test (before removing inappropriate items) Construct Item RH1 Religious Homogamy (RH) RH2 RH3 RH4 FOR1 Forgiveness FOR2 (FOR) FOR3 FOR4 FOR5 91 MS1 MS2 Marital Satisfaction MS3 (MS) MS4 MS5 Family- FW1 Work Resource FW2 Spillover (FW) FW3 CRE1 CRE2 Creativity (CRE) CRE3 CRE4 Table Pattern Matrix F1 F5 F2 F4 F3 FW0 FW2 FW1 FW3 MS3 MS2 MS4 MS1 CRE1 CRE2 92 CRE3 RH4 RH3 RH2 Table Scales reliability and validity CR 0.833 0.882 0.845 0.847 0.778 CRE FW FOR MS RH Table The structural model Hypothesis H1 H2 H3 H4 ***significant at p < 0.001; **significant at p < 0.01; *significant at p < 0.05 93 ... the honor and dignity of the other, there will be no forgiveness Marital Satisfaction The outcome shows that Religious Homogamy mainly influences marital Satisfaction Besides, Marital Satisfaction. .. copying and becoming followers Thus, this research aims to examines (1) How significant religious homogamy and forgiveness affect marital satisfaction; (2) identify the effect of marital satisfaction. .. affect the marital satisfaction which are religious homogamy and forgiveness and figure out how marriage can affect the employee’s creativity 84 Divorce rate in Vietnam is quite high and increases