A voluminous body of work in I-O psychology indicates that an individual’s work experiences influence how they interact with their partner. However, for a large portion of working parents, a partner is not the only person who they interact with at home. Moreover, a robust body of work in developmental psychology and family science has indicated that parenting styles are key predictors of children’s health and achievement. Yet despite their noted importance, there is little insight into the drivers of parenting style expression, and particularly proximal influences. Accordingly, in this dissertation I conducted an experience sampling study of working adults (N = 96) over 10 days to understand the processes by which basic need fulfillment separately through work and home roles may support subsequent role performance, in the form of parenting style expression. Specifically, I investigate associations between the fulfillment of basic psychological need fulfillment through the work and home roles and the state-level experience of resources that support performance in a subsequent role (positive affect, perspective-taking, and vigor) measured at end-of-workday, and parenting behaviors (measured next-morning). These relationships were tested in multilevel path models. There were main effects for work need satisfaction predicting positive affect and vigor, and even stronger positive effects for home need satisfaction in predicting positive affect, vigor, and child’s perspective-taking. Proposed enrichment states did not significantly relate to the expression of traditional parenting styles (authoritative, indulgent, authoritarian, and uninvolved parenting). However, perspective-taking was associated with more responsive and autonomy-supportive parenting, and vigor was also positively associated with responsive parenting. Mediation hypotheses and hypothesized cross-level moderation effects with work and family centrality were not supported. There was a three-way interaction between work need satisfaction and work and family centrality in predicting child’s perspective-taking. In effect, I find support that (a) having basic psychological needs satisfied within one domain may inform well-being states (positive affect, vigor) carrying over in a separate domain, and (b) established between-person parenting styles behaviors show significant variability within-person, and further, more nurturing parenting behaviors may be predicted by daily positive states. Thus, this study helps broaden understanding of outcomes of daily basic psychological need fulfillment within more than one domain, and proximal, state-level antecedents of parenting, a common yet understudied experience within the work-family interface.
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