Being a Parent Helps Being a Benevolent Leader: A Mixed-Method Approach

Abstract

Benevolent leadership as a typical human-centered leadership pattern has been constantly advocated but often sacrificed to the prevailing performanceism in today’s organizations. However, it still remains unclear on how to effectively facilitate the emergence of benevolent behavior for leaders, which would potentially hinder the adoption of benevolent leadership and its attainment of high priority. In the current research, we go beyond the workplace to explore one deliberate way leaders can bring family resources into their leadership practice to emerge more benevolent behaviors at work. From the experience-based leadership development perspective, supported by the theory of role accumulation across domains, we take a mixed-method approach to uncover the effect of positive parenting experience on benevolent leadership behavior via parent-leader role enrichment. In Study 1, we conduct a qualitative analysis based on the text content and interview provided by parent-role leaders to preliminarily reveal that being a parent makes a leader perform more behaviors with benevolent nature. In Study 2, we draw from the benefits of being a parent generated in Study 1 and the cross-role accumulation perspective to develop a theoretical model to delineate how the positive parenting experience yields benefits for benevolent leadership behavior. Results show that positive parenting experience can benefit parent-role leaders’ benevolent leadership behavior via perspective-taking ability. Meanwhile, both the positive parenting experience’s direct effect on perspective taking and its indirect effect on benevolent leadership behavior are stronger for individuals involved in high-quality co-parenting with their spouse, highlighting the important collaboration effects in the process of achieving parent-to-leader enrichment across domains.