Traditional versus Secular Values and the Job–Life Satisfaction Relationship Across Europe Yannis Georgellis and Thomas Lange 1 Centre for Research in Employment, Skills and Society (CRESS), Kingston Business School, Kingston University London, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT2 7LB, UK, and 1 School of Management, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845 Corresponding author email: y.georgellis@kingston.ac.uk Using data from the European Values Survey (EVS), we examine the relationship between job and life satisfaction across Europe. We find that for the majority of employ- ees job and life satisfaction are positively correlated, thus supporting the spillover hypothesis, whereby attitudes and practices developed in the life domain spill over into the work domain and vice versa. In contrast, we find little support for the compensation hypothesis, whereby employees who are dissatisfied in one domain seek compensatory rewards in the other domain. However, multivariate analysis reveals that the strength of the interaction between job and life satisfaction is mitigated by cultural values and interpersonal trust, as encapsulated in the ‘traditional versus secular values’ index reported in the EVS data. We thus find that predictors of the job–life satisfaction relationship vary across cultures and that such cross-cultural variations are systemati- cally related to salient cultural values and beliefs. The latter findings raise important questions about the universal application of existing theories in the subjective well-being arena. Introduction The interplay between job and life satisfaction has attracted considerable interest across a number of disciplines, including sociology, economics, man- agement and organizational psychology. Such interest is driven by the quest for a better under- standing of how individuals’ well-being is affected by the interaction between their life and work domains. Judge and Watanabe (1994) have pro- posed a methodology to produce a systematic taxonomy and a quantifiable measure of the potential interaction between the two domains, which is based on self-reported job and life satis- faction scores. According to Judge and Watanabe (1994), if job and life satisfaction are unrelated then this is evidence of segmentation between the work and life domains, in that job and life ex- periences are separated and display little or no related properties. Feelings and behaviour in one domain are not affecting behaviour and produc- tivity in the other domain (Gupta and Beehr, 1981; Lambert, 1990). If job and life satisfaction are correlated, then this is evidence of spillover or compensation effects between the two domains, depending on whether such a correlation is posi- tive or negative. The spillover hypothesis implies that attitudes and practices developed in the life domain can spill over into the work domain and vice versa, as manifested by a positive correlation between job and life satisfaction. Killing time at work can become killing time in leisure or apathy at work can lead to apathy in family life (Wilensky, 1961). A negative correlation between job and life satisfaction implies that compensation effects are present in situations where workers who are dissatisfied at work seek compensatory rewards outside work by decreasing involvement British Journal of Management, Vol. 23, 437–454 (2012) DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00753.x © 2011 The Author(s) British Journal of Management © 2011 British Academy of Management.. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.