The Skills That Strengthen Marriages—and Make Better Managers

Mountains of laundry, cranky children, Zoom calls in the dining room: Many working couples still shiver when they recall how COVID-19 lockdown upended domestic balance in their households.

On the plus side, the pandemic-induced togetherness also boosted gratitude among some couples, who gained a newfound appreciation for one another’s contributions in the home.

In interviewing dual-income, mixed-gender couples in the United States over a two-year period starting in 2020, Harvard Business School’s Kathleen L. McGinn and colleagues found that couples who experienced more gratitude and less resentment for one another shared two key patterns: Men showed greater attunement to household needs, and women delegated tasks to their partners more explicitly.

“One of the things that struck me was that people talked about how grateful they were for their spouses. This ran counter to the press at the time, talking about how COVID was destroying people’s relationships,” McGinn says.

For businesses navigating hybrid work and rising employee burnout, the findings extend beyond the household, indicating that workplaces may also benefit when leaders pay closer attention and delegate assignments. For instance, managers can take the time to notice when work is falling through the cracks, step in proactively to delegate tasks and attend to people’s needs, and make sure responsibilities are clearly shared among teams, McGinn says.

“A really great boss and coworker is one who attends to and cares about the people they work with, who makes sure their employees' needs are getting met. Those are the same things a good spouse would do,” McGinn says.

McGinn, Baker Foundation Professor and Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, cowrote the paper, “Division of Labor, Multiplication of Gratitude? Gratitude and Resentment Within Households,” with HBS Assistant Professor Alexandra C. Feldberg, Allison Daminger, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, HBS doctoral candidate Amanda Nerenberg, and Rachel Drapper, senior commercial manager of childcare sourcing platform Koru Kids. The article was published in March in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Couples cultivate gratitude by going the extra mile

Though women have been shouldering less at home and men have been pitching in more since the 1980s, women still report spending roughly 50% more time than men on housework and parenting tasks, according to 2024 US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This imbalance detracts from women’s well-being, relationship satisfaction, earnings, and career advancement, labor data shows.

Women not only complete more physical tasks at home, but McGinn and her colleagues also found that they take on more cognitive or mental labor—the work of anticipating household needs, as well as planning and managing family-related tasks and schedules.

In conducting 209 interviews with 37 men and 41 women, all of whom were in relationships, employed, and had children, the researchers first focused on gratitude for their partners. They defined gratitude for both men and women as the recognition that their partner was going above and beyond to do the unexpected. Women were more grateful than men, with 46% of women and 37% of men expressing gratitude on average in each interview round. Their reasons differed:

• Women were often grateful when men were surprisingly proactive. Men impressed their partners by taking charge of household tasks and logistically triaging and anticipating needs. For instance, women whose husbands independently handled dinner might be more grateful than women whose husbands waited to be told where to find the chicken nuggets. “There’s an expectation that men are going to help, but that difference between helping and doing it on their own is what women were most grateful for,” McGinn explains.

• Male gratitude revealed entrenched gender dynamics. Men were most grateful when a female partner’s household contributions made their professional lives easier and allowed them to focus on work: keeping kids at bay, handling distractions.

How mismatched expectations fuel resentment

The researchers defined resentment as gratitude’s inverse, not its absence. Predictably, this emotion festered during the pandemic: On average, 49% of men and 69% of women interviewed expressed resentment. Again, their reasons differed:

• Women’s resentment focused on under-involvement. They resented when men didn’t meet their expectations for household co-management, causing them to allocate tasks and act like supervisors. They also resented men who didn’t participate meaningfully in cognitive or physical labor. “For women, resentment grew when men weren’t acting on their own to take care of household tasks. Their gratitude came from men stepping in without being bidden,” McGinn says.

• Men grew resentful when they felt unrecognized. Men who took on household work sometimes felt that their physical contributions went unappreciated. For instance, maybe he didn’t clean to her standards. They also expressed resentment when they believed their partners expected them to anticipate problems they’d never considered, like remote school logistics.

Why delegation and paying attention matter

Sound familiar? The good news: One-third of couples reported a positive gratitude arc during COVID. For these couples, two important lessons emerged:

• Resentment dwindled when women delegated more. “Women’s gratitude expanded when they realized they could ask [for help]—and their partners would be open to that,” McGinn says. “It changed behavior: Men would start giving the ‘gifts’ women wanted them to give, figuring out what it takes to get two kids to school rather than just driving the car. Women basically said: ‘OK, I need to delegate. Rather than doing all this myself, I need to explicitly point out the tasks that need to be done and ask for help figuring out how to tackle them.’”

• Resentment also decreased when men became more proactive at home. “It’s not like people don’t pay attention; it’s that we’re gendered in these roles. Spending more time at home together with their families, some of the men started to become aware of how they were ‘helping’ instead of being equal partners. That greater attunement led to more gratitude, leading to real changes in behavior,” McGinn says.

How the workplace can replicate domestic peace

The pandemic might be over, but the dynamics it exposed at home carry important lessons for organizations, McGinn says. Just as couples benefited when partners became more attuned to one another’s needs and more explicit about sharing responsibilities, teams function better when managers recognize employees’ full cognitive load—both professionally and personally—and respond with clarity and flexibility.

Image by Ariana Cohen-Halberstam with assets from AdobeStock/stokkete.