Construct stewardship: Work–family as an illustrative case

Bowling and colleagues (2026) argue that construct proliferation threatens cumulative knowledge in I-O psychology.I agree and believe this problem shows up across I-O, occupational health psychology (OHP), and much of the social sciences, where construct drift and near synonyms blur theory tests, weaken meta-analytic accumulation, and muddy conclusions about intervention effects.I use work-family research as an illustrative case because it is my substantive area and because it is a strong example (i.e., the literature is mature, interdisciplinary, and methodologically diverse, which makes both construct crowding and practical remedies easy to see).However, rather than a moratorium, I argue for construct stewardship and offer a three-prong framework that generalizes beyond work-family: (a) primary study standards that require domain maps and nearest-neighbor tests; (b) editorial routines that treat refinement and measure linking as the default path to contribution; and (c) training plus shared resources that lower the cost of integration.To make the third prong concrete, I highlight the utility of the Kanter Zotero Library, which is a curated Zotero collection of Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award nominated work-family articles assembled by the Center for Families at Purdue University (Center for Families at Purdue University, 2025).Like many I-O areas (e.g., leadership, motivation, workplace aggression), work-family is especially vulnerable to construct crowding because it sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines, levels of analysis, and methods.The literature spans foundational constructs such as work-family conflict (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985) and has expanded to include positive interface concepts, boundary management, and dynamic approaches that capture within-person fluctuation and cross-domain processes (Allen & French, 2023;Perry-Jenkins & Gerstel, 2020).The field also has a long history of trying to clarify how work-family constructs relate to one another, including careful conceptual work that distinguishes constructs from mechanisms and outcomes (Edwards & Rothbard, 2000).More recent calls to put the family back into work-family research push the topic further into family processes and contexts (Kramer & Kramer, 2021).This growth is welcome, but it also makes it easy to introduce new constructs faster than the field can evaluate their distinctiveness and usefulness.Recent work-family research illustrates both progress and crowding.Episodic approaches show that work-family conflict and strain vary within people over time, and that conflict episodes can have near-term links with well-being (French & Allen, 2020).Meta-analytic work on dimension-based work-family conflict helps adjudicate whether added distinctions among facets are theoretically and empirically useful (Hetrick et al., 2024).