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Existing research has found that workplace negative gossip exerts a negative impact on employees and organizations. However, there is a lack of study on the spillover effect of workplace negative gossip on employees' families. This paper aimed to address this gap in prior literature. Based on resource conservation theory, we chose married employees who perceived or suffered from workplace negative gossip as the subjects and analyzed the effect of workplace negative gossip on their work-family conflict. We adopted a self-reported questionnaire to assess employees' perception or experience of workplace negative gossip, psychological distress, level of neuroticism, and work-family conflicts. A total of 245 valid employee questionnaires were obtained from two-wave data collection in China. The results of the empirical analysis indicated that workplace negative gossip perceived or suffered by employees has a positive impact on their workfamily conflicts, and psychological distress plays a mediating role in the relationship between perceived or suffered workplace negative gossip and employees' work-family conflict. Furthermore, we found that employees' level of neuroticism moderates the positive effect of workplace negative gossip and work-family conflict, and it also moderates the mediating effect of workplace negative gossip on employees' workfamily conflict by psychological distress. The conclusion of this paper supported our previous hypotheses. Finally, according to the earlier findings, we discussed the theoretical contributions, practical significance, and limitations of the study and provided some practical suggestions for managers.

The safety evaluation of geometry features design based on actual driving behavior has always been a basic concept of highway design. However, current design methods, including both the design speed method and operating speed method, are still far away from real-world driving conditions. In this work, we propose a new alignment design method which can take into account typical handing patterns (driving styles) of human drivers and can pay special attention to dangerous driving behaviors. The core of the proposed method is forecasting the trajectories of typical direction control patterns within roadway width, which can be used by drivers. Then, forecast the driving speed of typical speed control patterns on the basis of the curvature of the preview trajectory just determined. Mathematical programming method was used in this study, whereby the objective functions and constraints were developed to model the typical driving patterns. This article provided five direction control patterns and four speed control patterns to designers so that they could select an appropriate pattern to predict the trajectory and speed for the designed road. Finally, the trajectory and speed are used to control the geometric features of the road. Geometric features can determine the driveway shape, such as curve radius, deflection angle, spiral length, tangent length, roadway/lane/shoulder width, and any or all of these can be adjusted by the designer. Meanwhile, as more than one driving pattern is optional and vehicle performance, driving stability, and ride comfort restrictions are introduced to trajectory/speed decision-making, the new method more closely approximates to real-world driving than conventional methods. The application example shows that the proposed method is especially suitable for the horizontal alignment design of low/medium design speed highways that traverse rugged terrain.

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