Parent(-ing) at work: how employees navigate parenthood at work

Recent studies indicate that both work and nonwork experiences influence each other, leading to a highly interconnected and blended work-life experience for employees. This insight challenges the traditional assumption that the institutionalized nature of work and home confines roles to specific times and spaces. However, this insight has yet to be sufficiently incorporated into management scholarship, hindering our ability to fully understand how work-nonwork roles overlap and are managed. The parent role constitutes a dominant nonwork role that impacts work in a range of ways. Scholars disproportionately focus on the incompatibility between parent and work roles without addressing the outcomes of this incompatibility for employees’ lives or how it is managed. Our symposium presents five papers that exhibit the consequences of combining parenthood and work for the lives of employees as well as its navigation in both work and nonwork domains. Contributors draw on diverse theoretical perspectives¬—relational exchange, infrastructure shock, gender schema, role theory, boundary work, and identity—and unique contexts—entrepreneurship, a religious community, COVID-19, and fishermen community—to provide a broad vision of the parenthood-work overlap dynamic and its navigation. To foster meaningful discussions between the authors and the audience, our symposium will use a round table format instead of featuring a discussant after the paper presentations. When Motherhood and Entrepreneurship Collide Author: Elinor Flynn; London Business School Author: Vanessa Conzon; Boston College Passing As Stay-At-Home Moms: When Women Work in Patriarchal Societies Author: Elise B. Jones; U.S. Coast Guard Academy Author: Christine Deborah Bataille; Work-Family Infrastructure Shock: Challenging the Status Quo of Ideal Parent and Worker Author: Keimei Sugiyama; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Author: Jamie Jocelyn Ladge; Boston College Hockey Moms and Ballet Dads: On Forming a Parent Social Identity at Work Author: Namrata Sandhu; George Mason University Author: Heather Ciara Vough; George Mason University Fishing (for) Identity: Intergenerational Work Identity among Fathers and Sons Author: Muhammad Aqeel Awan; London School of Economics and Political Science Author: Niranjan Srinivasan Janardhanan;