Engage in Family Engage at Work: The Spillover Effect of Parental Involvement Among Burnout Parents

Abstract

For employees with school-age child(ren), managing demands at work and demands at home, and their children’s education becomes unavoidable, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. While most existing research of the work-family interface literature has focused on the negative effect of general or perceptual home demand on employees, less attention is paid to concrete family events including parental involvement in children’s education. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate how working employees’ parental involvement in children’s education at home influences their work-family interface. Drawing on conservation of resource theory (COR), we propose that parents could obtain flourishing experiences from their involvement in children’s education at home, which in turn translates into better engagement at work. Results of a two-wave survey of 206 full-time employees with at least one school-aged child lent support for our hypotheses that parental involvement enhanced flourishing experience at home, and subsequently improved work engagement and creative process engagement at work. However, the positive effect of parental involvement on flourishing, and its indirect effect on engagement at work as well, was significant only for those with high rather than a low level of parental burnout. Finally, we discuss theoretical contributions of present research.