The online language of work-personal conflict

Abstract

With the blurring of boundaries in this digital age, there is increasing concern around work-personal conflict. Assessing and tracking work-personal conflict is critical as it not only affects individual workers but is also a vital measure among broader well-being and economic indices. This inductive study examines the extent to which work-personal conflict corresponds to individuals’ language use on social media. We apply an open-vocabulary analysis to the posts of 2810 Facebook users who also completed a survey for an established work-personal conflict scale. It was found that the language-based model can predict personal-to-work conflict (r = 0.23) and work-to-personal conflict (r = 0.15) and provide important insights into such conflicts. Specifically, we found that high personal-to-work conflict was associated with netspeak and swearing, while low personal-to-work conflict was associated with language about work and positivity. We found that high work-to-personal conflict was associated with negative emotion and negative tone, while low work-to-personal conflict was associated with positive emotion and language about birthdays.