Abstract
Emotional exhaustion has severe consequences for organizations and employees, with the current study demonstrating long-reaching effects on the home domain and family members. We integrate social cognitive theory with spillover and crossover. We propose that parents’ emotional exhaustion crosses over to their adolescents, increasing emotional exhaustion at school. We theorize this crossover occurs via adolescents learning how to fake their emotions (i.e., surface act) from their parents. In addition, we propose that parent–adolescent relationship quality represents an important relational context for understanding when adolescents learn to surface act. We examine these theoretical extensions using a sample of fathers, mothers, and adolescents (N = 256 families) at four time points across six weeks. Our results suggest that mothers’ emotional exhaustion is associated with increased surface acting at home, which is associated with increased adolescent surface acting, and finally, adolescent emotional exhaustion at school. In contrast, we did not find support for the overall model for fathers. Furthermore, this transmission process is not dependent on the parent–child relationship. These results suggest a novel social learning pathway by which emotional exhaustion from work spreads to adolescent children. Our findings indicate that organizational efforts to reduce emotional exhaustion may benefit employees and their adolescent children.
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A related term in the emotion labor literature is emotion work, which is defined as “an aspect of domestic labor involving giving emotional support to others at home by comforting, encouraging, and nurturing” (Grandey & Krannitz, 2015, p. 6). We chose to use the broader emotion regulation term instead of emotion work. We are more interested in parents regulating their emotions at home, whereas emotion work refers to providing emotional support at home.
There is ample research that also suggests parent–child relationship quality directly relates to stronger or more adaptive emotion regulation strategies, particularly at home with parents (e.g., Brumariu, 2015; Gross & Cassidy, 2019; Matias et al., 2017; Morris et al., 2007; Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2017). However, we do not explore this possibility because (1) we are focused on surface acting as a specific emotion regulation strategy (rather than adaptive regulation, or emotional control), and (2) we predict surface acting at school rather than at home. The interested reader might also see lack of support for the direct effect role of relationship quality in our correlations, which suggest father and mother parent-adolescent relationship quality are not related to father, mother, or adolescent surface acting.
We collected additional data from 331 adolescents to independently validate our parent-adolescent relationship quality scale. See our online supporting materials for details. Parent–adolescent relationship quality (α = .94 for father and .92 for mother) was significantly correlated (p < .001) respectively with parent–adolescent communication (r = .81, α = .90 for father; r = .72, α = .86 for mother; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), parent trust (r = .87, α = .92 for father; r = .83, α = .88 for mother, Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), and overall parent–adolescent emotional quality (r = .74 for father and .65 for mother; Kouros et al., 2014). Overall, we concluded our parent–adolescent relationship quality scale exhibits construct validity.
Although students are nested within classrooms, the ICCs for our variables were low (ranging from .001 to .036, mean = .011), and log-likelihood comparison tests suggested a multilevel null model did not fit the data better than an OLS null model (p > .05 for all variables). Nevertheless, we use cluster-robust standard errors in line with best practice recommendations (Bliese et al., 2018).
The father’s emotional exhaustion indirectly spreads to adolescent’s emotional exhaustion when they had a positive parent–adolescent relationship, after controlling for adolescent’s age and gender.
As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, it is also possible gender may be modifying our model (Spector & Brannick, 2011). We also explored gender as a moderator, but we found no significant interaction effects. Full details are available on our OSF website.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for these interesting suggestions.
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The authors are grateful for the financial support from Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health.
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JT designed the research and collected data. JT ran all the analyses. JT, DVE, KF wrote the first draft of the paper. All the authors contribute to the revised paper.
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Appendix 1. Data Transparency
Appendix 1. Data Transparency
The data reported in this manuscript have been previously published in (redacted for anonymity). These data were collected as part of a larger data collection (at one or more points in time). Findings from the data collection have been reported in separate manuscripts. MS 1 (published) focuses on variables 1–9; while MS 2 (current) focuses on variables 6 and 10–15. Table 2 displays where each data variable appears in each study, as well as the current status of each study.
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Tong, J., Van Egdom, D., French, K. et al. Parent–Adolescent Transmission of Emotional Exhaustion: Testing a Social-Cognitive Spillover and Crossover Model. J Bus Psychol 40, 575–591 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-024-09974-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-024-09974-3
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