Effects of parents' work characteristics on their children's educational priorities and learning behaviors

Description

A number of research papers deal with the dissolution of boundaries at work and postulate that professional and private life are becoming increasingly intermingled. Evidence for this can be found in spatial (e.g., home office) and temporal (constant accessibility via smartphones) terms. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask whether certain work characteristics (esp. autonomy, importance of the task, holistic nature of the task, and feedback at work) that parents experience in their jobs have an impact on their parenting behavior or parenting priorities towards their children, and if this is the case, whether this subsequently has an influence on the children's attitude towards work and is possibly reflected in the children's school performance. To investigate these assumptions, we conducted an online panel survey involving 964 individuals who are employed and have school-age children. Subjects were administered the Work Design Questionnaire (WDQ; Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006) and other scales capturing parents' educational priorities, children's homework behavior, and children's academic performance, among other measures. Linear regression analyses show that parents' educational priorities can be significantly predicted based on their work characteristics. School-related educational priorities of parents are further associated with children's homework behavior, and children's homework behavior is correlated with their academic achievement. Further analysis shows that the relationship between job characteristics and school performance is mediated by educational priorities and homework behavior. In our paper, we discuss the significance and limitations of the findings reported here.

Period	13 Sept 2023
Event title	13th Conference of the Division of Industrial, Organizational and Business Psychology
Event type	Conference
Location	GermanyShow on map