Although governments and organizations have introduced family-responsive practices, such as maternity leave, to encourage women to continue their careers, there remain significant gender gaps in career progress. Return from maternity leave to work is a critical career transition period in working women's professional lives. Many women consider withdrawing from their professional careers after childbirth and, even when they decide to come back to work, they go through a significant readjustment process, experiencing major efficacy uncertainties. In this study, we developed a training program for working mothers during maternity leave to help them better prepare for their return to work. We examined the program in Japan, where working mothers experience significant pressure to conform to gender-based social roles and face challenges in continuing their career, owing to the country's cultural traditions. Our study shows that the training program helps boost working mothers' work-family balance self-efficacy, which in turn contributes to better supervisorrated in-role performance after they return to work. Our study suggests that organizations can supplement their family-friendly policies by providing maternity leave takers with our training program to enhance working mothers' work-family balance self-efficacy and help working mothers better readapt to work.
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