What is it about?
Stressful work experiences can influence how employees behave toward their families later that day. We followed 86 working parents over ten workdays, surveying them near the end of work and again in the evening. On days with greater emotional demands at work, participants reported more irritability toward family members. Continued negative thinking about work helped explain this association. However, the relationship was weaker among people with greater self-reflectivity—the ability to recognize, examine, and understand their thoughts and emotions. More detailed analyses showed that self-reflectivity appeared particularly protective against irritability toward children, whereas emotional demands were associated with irritability toward partners regardless of self-reflectivity.
Featured Image
Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The findings help explain how a difficult workday may enter family life: employees can remain mentally and emotionally occupied with work and become impatient or irritable without fully recognizing the source of their feelings. Self-reflection may help them identify work as the source, gain psychological distance, and respond more deliberately at home. Organizations should nevertheless prioritize reducing unnecessary emotional demands, managing interpersonal conflicts, and providing recovery time, debriefing, and support after difficult encounters. Reflective journaling, brief check-ins, or emotion-tracking tools may offer additional support, but they should complement—not replace—healthy work design. The target-specific findings also show that family spillover is more complex than a single general process.
Perspectives
Work-related strain does not necessarily end when employees leave work. People may continue thinking about emotionally demanding situations and become irritable at home without recognizing where those feelings originated. For me, self-reflectivity is valuable because it can help people name their emotional state, trace its source, and create some distance before reacting. It is not simply about suppressing negative emotions. At the same time, individual reflection cannot compensate for persistently harmful working conditions. Organizations remain responsible for reducing avoidable emotional demands and enabling recovery. The different findings for children and partners also remind us that the family domain is not uniform: spillover may unfold differently across particular relationships.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rigotti
Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Role of Self-Reflectivity in the Association Between Emotional Demands at Work and Irritability Toward Family Members at Home, Journal of Business and Psychology, March 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10869-026-10110-6.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
