Leadership Spotlight

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What's the upshot?

Yes, people often flounder at home and at work during full-fledged crises. But a busy personal life, with children and careers and the inherent stress that comes with them, actually makes for a more engaged employee over the long haul, says Rothbard, whose views are the result of a major study she led at Michigan. Published in 2001 in Administrative Science Quarterly, the study, titled "Enriching or Depleting? The Dynamics of Engagement in Work and Family Roles," yielded 790 respondents. It found that "work engagement" is not negatively affected by family-related stress, for men or for women. And women, the study found, most often throw themselves into their work even more during times of extreme personal stress, seeing the office as a kind of haven from a negative home environment.

"The depletion that is so feared by organizations from family to work does not exist," Rothbard says. "And I suggest to organizations that their beliefs about women may be wrong. As a manager, don't make the automatic assumption that a woman with a rich family life is not going to be engaged in her work. She could be very engaged. Her time may be limited, but her focus may be very much all there."

Rothbard's findings mean organizations can have some assurance that family involvement is not achieved at the expense of work. But the study also found that for women, leaving a negative work environment at the office isn't so easy. Women struggling with an unhappy work life are often less engaged with their families. "This is a tough reality for women," Rothbard says. "If they aren't happy in their work, they are often less able to be involved and focused at home." Men, conversely, are able to "segment" their work and home lives, the study found, so that negative emotions or stress typically do not adversely affect either role. "This isn't to say that there aren't men who find themselves incredibly drained at work by stress at home or at home by work stress," Rothbard says. "But most men, I found, are able to put these things aside and function well in their various roles."

Rothbard's study went beyond issues of employee depletion at home and at work, however. As she began her work at Michigan, Rothbard was struck by the near-total lack of research on the benefits an individual's personal life might bring to their work. She saw this as a critical oversight and tackled the issue in her study. "The work/family literature really only talked about the depletion issue – about the phenomenon of something negative happening to you and that it drains you and makes you less able to focus on your other role because you're busy coping, whether it be work or family. I think this is only part of the story." Rothbard found support for this argument in sociological research, which suggested that multiple roles are actually beneficial to many people.

"We all have positive, uplifting moments in our work lives and our personal lives. We bring those to our work and our homes, and they make us happy and open and available. They give us energy and help us engage and create," she says.

Rothbard's study found both men and women experience this enrichment, though not in the same way. Men's positive work-related emotions spill over and enhance their family engagement, while women experience enrichment through positive family-related emotions enhancing their work involvement. "These findings contradict the dominant paradigm that assumes work and family roles are only depleting to one another," she says, adding that she was somewhat surprised by the magnitude of the gender differences throughout her study.

All in all, Rothbard's study makes some important contributions to work/family research, she believes. Her findings point to the importance of investigating both depletion and enrichment aspects of work and family, as well as pinpointing an emotion-based process by which engagement in one role relates to engagement in another role. "Assumptions about taking on many roles abound, suggesting that tradeoffs must be made between roles to achieve success in either," she says. "This study provides a strong counterpoint to this view by revealing the potential for enrichment. For organizations, far from confirming fears that family life is achieved at the expense of work, this work suggests that, for men, family does not affect work engagement, and for women, family enhances work focus. Rather than trying to limit family commitments and participation in other roles, organizations may do well to encourage these activities, because people often gain energy from them."