We were all in it together: managing work from home as dual-earner households with school-age children
We were all in it together: managing work from home as dual-earner households with school-age children
We examine how professional dual-earner couples, with school-age children, who worked from home during the COVID-19 lockdown, adjusted to the changes it brought to their lives. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of 28 dual-earner households that had at least one school-age child, resided in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and worked from home during their local lockdown period. In each household, we interviewed the parents (56 total), and we asked at least one child to draw their perception of their parents' work-from-home experience and narrate the drawing (31 total). Informed by work–home interface and family stress scholarships, we outline the resources and demands generated by working at home as a family, as well as the strategies families employed to manage their collective work from home. We extend work-from-home scholarship beyond the individual level by accounting for the roles of all collective members in the work-from-home experience. We complement the research that has studied individual- and couple-level work–family strategies by theorizing the supportive, attentive, relational, delegative, and compromising strategies families adopted to generate changes in resource-demand dynamics. In doing so, we introduce family adaptive capability for the context of adjusting to work from home and define it as a collective ability to initiate strategies to meet remote work demands with resources generated from the new work arrangement. At a practical level, the strategies presented in our work can inform employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.
dual-earner couple, family adaptive capability, remote work, work from home, work-family interface
Beigi, Mina
2986037e-5bb3-4ec0-be55-bf291ac17e24
Shirmohammadi, Melika
d0967cb1-0c2b-454a-ba78-d7a4152ab6dd
Au, Wee Chan
d784e090-2936-4010-a963-2d1a27f90472
Tochia, Chira
0e06b413-1436-4455-afeb-22a6583a8d7c
8 November 2023
Beigi, Mina
2986037e-5bb3-4ec0-be55-bf291ac17e24
Shirmohammadi, Melika
d0967cb1-0c2b-454a-ba78-d7a4152ab6dd
Au, Wee Chan
d784e090-2936-4010-a963-2d1a27f90472
Tochia, Chira
0e06b413-1436-4455-afeb-22a6583a8d7c
Beigi, Mina, Shirmohammadi, Melika, Au, Wee Chan and Tochia, Chira
(2023)
We were all in it together: managing work from home as dual-earner households with school-age children.
Journal of Organizational Behavior.
(doi:10.1002/job.2755).
Abstract
We examine how professional dual-earner couples, with school-age children, who worked from home during the COVID-19 lockdown, adjusted to the changes it brought to their lives. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of 28 dual-earner households that had at least one school-age child, resided in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and worked from home during their local lockdown period. In each household, we interviewed the parents (56 total), and we asked at least one child to draw their perception of their parents' work-from-home experience and narrate the drawing (31 total). Informed by work–home interface and family stress scholarships, we outline the resources and demands generated by working at home as a family, as well as the strategies families employed to manage their collective work from home. We extend work-from-home scholarship beyond the individual level by accounting for the roles of all collective members in the work-from-home experience. We complement the research that has studied individual- and couple-level work–family strategies by theorizing the supportive, attentive, relational, delegative, and compromising strategies families adopted to generate changes in resource-demand dynamics. In doing so, we introduce family adaptive capability for the context of adjusting to work from home and define it as a collective ability to initiate strategies to meet remote work demands with resources generated from the new work arrangement. At a practical level, the strategies presented in our work can inform employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.
Text
J Organ Behavior - 2023 - Beigi - We were all in it together Managing work from home as dual‐earner households with
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More information
Accepted/In Press date: 18 September 2023
Published date: 8 November 2023
Additional Information:
Funding Information: we thank Idaho State University for supporting this study with an internal small research grant. We thank Azadeh Hashemian, a nonfiction writer and translator, who helped us with data collection from our Iranian participants.
Keywords:
dual-earner couple, family adaptive capability, remote work, work from home, work-family interface
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 484964
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/484964
ISSN: 0894-3796
PURE UUID: 675cbd49-7fb2-41ca-9edf-b4f807c40483
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Date deposited: 27 Nov 2023 17:33
Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 01:59
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Author:
Melika Shirmohammadi
Author:
Wee Chan Au
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