Parent–Adolescent Transmission of Emotional Exhaustion: Testing a Social-Cognitive Spillover and Crossover Model

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.