Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2025

Journal / Book Title

Journal of Management & Organization

Abstract

As the number of working parents rises, employers are increasingly called upon to support employees’ work–family (WF) obligations. Grounded in conservation of resources theory, we examined how providing varying degrees of parental support (paid vs. unpaid leave and family-supportive vs. -unsupportive leadership) is mutually beneficial to employee and organizational well-being – the ultimate criterion for organizational science. Participants (N = 538) were randomly assigned to read vignettes that varied the amount of parental support provided for expectant working parents. We tested whether WF benefits fairness perceptions moderated the indirect effects of parental support on felt obligation through job-related anxiety. Findings supported our proposed moderated-mediation model, with the most positive effects when full parental support was provided to individuals with high fairness perceptions. Our research highlights the value of providing both paid leave and family-supportive leadership, while also considering employees’ fairness perceptions, to reap the most gains of employee and organizational well-being.

DOI

10.1017/jmo.2025.10048

Rights

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Published Citation

Scheuer, C.-L., Grotto, A. R., & Doll, J. L. (2025). If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you: The mutual gains of parental support for employee and organizational well-being. Journal of Management & Organization, 1–28. doi:10.1017/jmo.2025.10048

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