The Intergenerational Effects Of Phantom Lives: How The Forgone Professional Identities Of Parents Influence The Self-Defeating Behaviors And Burnout Of Their Children At Work

The weight of evidence within intergenerational research, or the extent to which behaviors and characteristics of individuals from one generation affect those in the subsequent generation, indicates that parents massively influence their children’s personalities, value sets, relational networks, and socioeconomic status. In management, this work has studied how a parent’s professional identity is perpetuated by the child (e.g. doctors rear doctors). Drawing from recent challenges in the identity literature, I extend this intergenerational research to explore how a parent’s forgone professional identity—the professional identity an employee could have been had a key decision or event in life happened differently—intergenerationally affects their child’s work outcomes. Across three studies, I find evidence that parents who dwelled on their forgone professional identity were more likely to engage in vicarious enactment, yearning for their child to attain the professional identity they could not. To ensure such attainment, these parents, in turn, were more psychologically controlling, as they push their children to meet their standards. This controlling parenting imprinted a negative self-schema in child that they carried with them into adulthood and the workplace. Consequently, to cope with these negative self-schematic attributions and implications, these employees were more likely to exhibit self-defeating behavior, such as procrastination, and report being more burnout at work. In short, the “phantom lives” of parents haunted not only the parent, but the subsequent generation of employees.