Abstract

Family amplifies gender biases in organizations, presenting an ethical dilemma for modern organizations. Specifically, women tend to face additional barriers to leadership when they become mothers, while men often experience the opposite. But what about leaders’ family explains these fatherhood bonuses? Focusing on work-family conflict (WFC), we theorize that this ostensibly negative state paradoxically motivates followers because it signals an opportunity to expend extra effort to help their leaders. We further theorize this helping process is stronger for male (vs. female) leaders because WFC is a more noticeable violation of gendered stereotypes, which followers respond to with motivation to help their (male) leaders to resolve cognitive dissonance. A multi-source field study of leader–follower dyads (Ntotal = 290) supported our theorizing, which we causally replicated and extended with a pair of pre-registered behavioral and recall experiments (Ntotal = 920). These results inform theory and practice of gender inequalities while also revealing new mechanisms that explain behavioral fatherhood bonuses.