Many employees think about their work during off-job time. Scholars have suggested that whether work-related thoughts during off-job time have detrimental or beneficial effects on employees’ well-being and performance depends on the nature of these thoughts. In this study with dual-earner couples we examined whether employees’ positive and negative work reflection during off-job time are associated with their own and with their partners’ work engagement and exhaustion. Furthermore, we investigated whether (a) living with children and (b) being work-linked (i.e. working in the same organisation and/or working in the same profession) moderated these relations. Both partners of 130 German heterosexual dual-earner couples responded to online questionnaires. We estimated multilevel analyses using the actor–partner interdependence model to analyse our dyadic data. We found positive associations between employees’ positive work reflection and both their own and their partners’ work engagement. Employees’ positive work reflection was also associated with their decreased exhaustion. Employees’ negative work reflection was negatively associated with their own work engagement and positively associated with their own exhaustion but unrelated to their partners’ outcomes. Moderator analyses revealed that living with children weakened the link between employees’ positive work reflection and their own work engagement and strengthened the link between their negative work reflection and exhaustion. The presence of couples’ work-linkage did not moderate any of these relations. This study builds on previous research by showing that employees’ positive work-related thinking is not only beneficial to themselves but also to their partners. Furthermore, the results suggest that living with children constitutes an additional demand that reduces the motivational effects of positive work reflection and amplifies the detrimental effects of employees’ negative work reflection.

许多员工会在下班时间考虑自己的工作。学者们提出，下班时间与工作相关的想法对员工的幸福感和绩效是否产生有害或有利影响，取决于这些想法的性质。在这项针对双职工的研究中，我们研究了员工在下班期间的积极和消极工作反射是否与他们自己以及与伴侣的工作投入和精疲力有关。此外，我们调查了（a）与儿童一起生活和（b）与工作相关（即在同一组织工作和/或在同一专业工作）是否缓和了这些关系。130对德国异性恋双口夫妇的伴侣都对在线问卷进行了回复。我们使用参与者之间的相互依赖模型来估计多层次分析，以分析我们的二元数据。我们发现员工的积极工作反思与他们自己和合作伙伴的工作投入之间存在积极的联系。员工积极的工作反思也与他们的疲惫减少有关。员工的消极工作反映与他们自己的工作投入负相关，与他们的疲惫程度呈正相关，但与合作伙伴的业绩无关。主持人的分析显示，与孩子一起生活削弱了员工积极的工作反思与他们自己的工作投入之间的联系，并增强了他们的消极的工作反思与疲惫之间的联系。夫妻之间的工作联系并没有缓解任何这种关系。这项研究以以前的研究为基础，表明员工积极的与工作相关的思维不仅对自己有利，而且对合作伙伴也有利。此外，研究结果表明，与孩子一起生活构成了额外的需求，这些需求降低了积极工作反思的动机影响，并放大了员工消极工作反思的不利影响。