Military Men’s Taking the Perspective of their Wives: The Predictive Role of Work-Family Conflict, Flexibility and Emotional Labor

Members of the armed forces have a high-tension and specifically complex job associated with physical dangers and being away from the family, which can affect married life. The purpose of this study was to predict military men’s taking the perspective of their wives based on work-family conflict, flexibility, and emotional labor. The research design is descriptive-correlational. The statistical population consisted of all the official staff of a military organization based in Ahvaz, Iran. A sample of 200 subjects was selected from among the married men through the purposive sampling method. The instruments utilized in this study included the Carikci Work-Family Conflict Scale, the Flexibility Subscale of the Bar-On Emotional Intelligence Scale, the Emotional Labor Questionnaire (Briët et al.), and the Long Perspective-Taking Scale. To test the hypotheses, Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis with simultaneous and step-by-step methods were used. The results indicated a significant negative relationship between work-family conflict (r = -0.239) and emotional labor (r = -0.491) and a positive significant relationship (r = 0.619) between flexibility and perspective-taking (p < 0.05). Also, the simultaneous regression analysis revealed that a combination of the three variables accounted for about 45 percent of the variance. The stepwise regression analysis further showed that emotional labor and flexibility were the best predictors of perspective-taking. Military people’s marital relationships are very important and their perspective-taking, as an important variable, can be predicted based on work-family conflict, flexibility, and emotional labor.