Expanding the Caring Capacity: An Integrative Review of Nontraditional Caregiving and the Workplace Caregiving Literature

Abstract

Management scholarship has long explored how life outside of work impacts work, and it has accumulated rich theoretical insights on how being a mother or father impacts one’s job and the organization. Importantly, however, this literature has adopted a limited scope of who and what caregiving embodies, overlooking the millions of workers globally who find themselves caring for a parent, a person with a disability, or someone who faces unique marginalization. We use new research on nontraditional caregiving (NTC) roles to enrich the topic of caregiving more broadly. As such, we provide an integrative review of 353 multidisciplinary workplace articles to detail the workplace outcomes explored in the literature and identify four caregiving dimensions that cannot be fully understood by a traditional caregiving framework alone. Further, we build a multilevel framework that identifies novel processes across roles, thereby bridging the nontraditional and traditional caregiving literatures and introducing ways to redirect future research. Overall, this review aims to show that caregiving should be viewed more broadly than it is currently, and this review aims to build a foundation for better understanding the complexities of caregiving in all its forms.