Past research has studied how working with animals shapes psychological processes in specialized employees (e.g., veterinarians, zookeepers, etc.), but little is known about how pet caregiving at home affects the work-related outcomes of general employees. More households in the US live with a pet than with a child, and pet owners typically regard their pets as family. It is thus a critical oversight to overlook this group of employees. To understand how pet caregiving intersects with work outcomes, we employ a mixed-method approach by first collecting qualitative data from 60 full-time employees who are pet owners to explore their experiences with managing their pets and work (Study 1). Contrary to past studies that have demonstrated human-pet interaction to be beneficial, our findings suggest that pet caregiving could be detrimental for human-human relationships in the workplace. To shed light on this counterintuitive phenomenon, we identify selective investment theory to develop a two-stage moderated-mediation model linking pet caregiving with social loafing at work. We hypothesize that pet caregiving at home would positively predict social loafing via its negative relation with empathy for coworkers. Importantly, we also propose lower (vs. higher) organizational permissiveness and lower (vs. higher) work-related self-entitlement respectively as first-stage and second-stage moderators that mitigate these detrimental effects. Field survey data (Study 2) collected over three waves (N = 114) support the hypotheses, and we discuss the theoretical and practical implications.
