Recently, the research interest in paradoxical leadership has dramatically increased. Existing research shows that paradoxical leadership can not only affect organization-level outcomes, but also exert an effect on employees at the individual-level. These fruitful findings enrich the paradoxical leadership literature. However, our understanding on paradoxical leader behavior is still limited. In particular, existing research mainly focuses on the effect of paradoxical leader behavior on subordinates within the organization, but ignores that the leader behavior may have an impact on employees’ work-family balance outside the work domain. As work-family balance has been mentioned as a paradoxical phenomenon by scholars many times and the leader is one of the most important factors to employees when balancing their work and family, this study aims to explore the effect of paradoxical leadership on employees’ work-family balance. Combining the social learning theory and the work-family enrichment theory, this study proposes a dual-path moderated mediating model to examine the relationship between paradoxical leader behavior and employees’ work-family balance.

This study uses a two-stage questionnaire survey to collect data from commercial bank employees. The interval between the two stages is one month. The first sentence of both questionnaires tells the respondents that the survey is anonymous and the information collected is for scientific research only. In the first stage, 230 employees were randomly selected to rate perceived paradoxical leadership, paradox mindset and their demographic information. In the second stage, the questionnaire, including holistic thinking, work-family positive spillover and work-family balance, was distributed to 213 employees who had finished the first questionnaire. Finally, 192 valid samples were obtained, and the research model and the theoretical hypothesis were tested by confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistical analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and Monte Carlo simulation.

The empirical result shows that paradoxical leadership is positively related to employees’ work-family balance, and this relationship is mediated by employees’ holistic thinking and work-family positive spillover. Moreover, it shows that the effect of paradoxical leadership is moderated by employees’ paradox mindset, that is, the positive relationship between paradoxical leadership and employees’ work-family balance through their work-family positive spillover is not significant when employees’ paradox mindset is low.

The main contributions of this study are as follows: First, it links paradoxical leadership with the work-family balance of employees, which not only responds to the call of exploring the micro-level paradox phenomenon, but also improves the understanding of work-family balance from the perspective of paradox. Second, it enriches the paradoxical leadership literature by exploring the mediating role of employees’ holistic thinking and work-family positive spillover. Third, it provides new empirical evidence for the leader-follower fit issue within the paradoxical perspective by investigating the moderating role of employees’ paradox mindset. As for managerial implications, leaders should be especially aware that not all employees are equally affected by paradoxical leadership. For employees with low paradox mindset, paradoxical leadership is less beneficial.