A Bidirectional, Reciprocal Social Learning Model on Power Couples’ Role Salience and Creativity

Power couples have existed across centuries and industries, yet it has received little attention in organizational behavior research. Build on social learning theory and work-family literature, we propose and test a bidirectional reciprocal model, arguing that both power couples’ weekly role (i.e., family/work) salience and role modeling, influence each other, which in turn, will shape both power couples’ creativity at work and family. Our Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) analysis from 211 full-time power couple in the US collected weekly across six weeks shows that both couple members’ weekly family salience (but not weekly career salience) crosses over and impacts the respective others’ family-related creativity outcomes via social learning from their respective partner. Our paper makes significant contributions to both work-family and creativity literatures, by showing a specific work-family crossover mechanism, and showing that creativity can not only be achieved by one, but dual.