Becoming a parent can bring about more changes than home life, and for some, it may even change the way you view your work life. New research published in Journal of Applied Psychology This suggests that parents, especially mothers, are more likely than non-parents to view their work as a means of demonstrating values such as responsibility and commitment to family. This stronger sense of purpose was associated with greater work engagement and more constructive workplace behavior.
Working parents are often discussed in terms of conflict, with the demands of childcare seen as competing with career responsibilities. These beliefs contribute to the “motherhood penalty,” in which mothers are often perceived as less committed employees and may face disadvantages in hiring, promotion, and pay. In contrast, fathers may benefit from a “fatherhood premium.” However, there is growing evidence to suggest that family life can also enrich work by improving wellbeing, developing useful skills and promoting increased efficiency.
The researchers proposed another explanation that has received less attention. That is, being a parent has the potential to change society. meaning People are attached to their jobs. Rather than viewing work simply as a source of income, parents may view work as an opportunity to demonstrate qualities such as responsibility and integrity to their children. The researchers called this the family-centered symbolic meaning of work, the belief that work allows people to be role models for their families. We also predicted that this view would be particularly strong among mothers, as women are often subject to greater social expectations regarding caregiving and moral guidance within the family.
Researchers Huiyao Liao and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed the first new scale to measure the symbolic meaning of family-centered work. They then tested it on 283 employees (223 women and 60 men) of a Chinese pharmaceutical company. The mean age of the sample was 35.5 years. The sample consisted of 181 mothers, 32 fathers, 42 childless women, and 28 childless men.
Employees completed surveys across two time points. At the third time point, 52 supervisors rated each employee’s work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. The latter are extra-role behaviors that indirectly increase organizational effectiveness and specifically refer to “ethical speaking behavior,” that is, communicating concerns about ethical violations or suggestions for maintaining ethical standards. This finding was then replicated in another Chinese sample of 294 employees and a U.S. sample of 300 employees.
Across the studies, parents were more likely than non-parents to see their work as a way to set an example for their families. In the first study, this relationship was strongest among women. Employees who reported more family-centered meaning were also rated by their supervisors as putting more effort into their work and engaging in more frequent ethical speaking behaviors that benefit the organization.
Importantly, these relationships hold even after accounting for other well-established explanations for why home life is beneficial for work, such as improved mood, parenting-related skills, and increased efficiency. This suggests that deriving symbolic meaning from work may represent a further route through which parenthood influences behavior at work. One participant explained, “I want to teach them that hard work pays off in the end.”
It should be noted that this study has several limitations. Because this is observational, we cannot prove whether parenting directly causes changes in work behavior. Additionally, the main sample was heavily biased toward mothers, and working fathers and childless men were underrepresented.
The researchers also measured work behaviors evaluated by superiors, rather than objective outcomes such as productivity, promotions, or pay. The authors noted that this may be why their findings contradict previous research on the motherhood penalty. Whereas previous studies measured subjective evaluations of promotability and employability, this study measured specific work behaviors that can be perceived more objectively. Therefore, the findings do not indicate whether employers recognize or reward this potential “advantage of motherhood.”
The study, “Uncovering the Benefits of Motherhood: How Parenthood Affects Perceptions of the Meaning of Work and Work Outcomes,” was authored by Huiyao Liao, Tammy D. Allen, Zhaopeng Liu, Thomas Ptashnik, and I-Heng (Ray) Wu.
