Thriving at school and succeeding at work? A demands-resources view of spillover processes in working students

Despite the fact that at least forty percent of students enrolled in college full-time also hold part-time employment, this sector of the workforce has been severely understudied in organizational research. Although there have been efforts to explore how work demands and resources spillover to influence academic outcomes, particularly little attention has been paid to the extent to which school experiences affect work outcomes. Accordingly, little is known about how demands and resources within the work- and school-domains individually and jointly predict work-related well-being and performance. In light of this gap in our understanding, we build from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) and Work-Home Resources (WH-R; ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012) models to develop and test hypotheses regarding within- and cross-domain relations among demands, resources, and their interaction in the prediction of work outcomes in a sample of part-time working students (N = 188). Utilizing a longitudinal research design with evaluations of both student well-being and supervisor ratings of work performance, we observed a larger role for within-domain (i.e., work) demands and resources in the prediction of work outcomes. As such, our work adds insight into the experiences of students who are working part-time.