Work-family Boundaries Research Articles

The Pressure-Status Nexus and Blurred Work–Family Boundaries

Job pressure is associated with increased role-blurring activities. Does higher status attenuate or exacerbate that association? Using data from a national sample of workers, the authors' study discovers that higher status functions as a moderator in what they call the pressure-status nexus. Job pressure is associated more strongly with role blurring among the well educated, professionals, managers, and high earners. Also, job pressure is associated most strongly with role blurring among higher status men. The authors' articulation of the pressure-status nexus extends the stress of higher status perspective, demonstrating that higher statuses compound the ways that job pressure is linked with activities that blur the work–family boundary.

Work-family boundary strategies: Stability and alignment between preferred and enacted boundaries

Are individuals bounding work and family the way they would like? Much of the work–family boundary literature focuses on whether employees are segmenting or integrating work with family, but does not explore the boundaries workers would like to have, nor does it examine the fit between desired and enacted boundaries, or assess boundary stability. In this study, 23 respondents employed at a large Fortune 500 company were interviewed about their work–family boundaries before and after their teams underwent a cultural change initiative that sought to loosen workplace norms and allow employees more autonomy to decide when and where they performed their job tasks. Four distinct boundary strategies emerged from the data, with men and parents of young children having better alignment between preferred and enacted boundaries than women and those without these caregiving duties. Implications for boundary theory and research are discussed.

How Work–Family Research Can Finally Have an Impact in Organizations

Although work-family research has mushroomed over the past several decades, an implementation gap persists in putting work-family research into practice. Because of this, work-family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted. The goal of this article is to clarify areas where implementation gaps between work-family research and practice are prevalent, discuss the importance of reducing these gaps, and make the case that both better and different research should be conducted. We recommend several alternative but complementary actions for the work-family researcher: (a) work with organizations to study their policy and practice implementation efforts, (b) focus on the impact of rapid technological advances that are blurring work-family boundaries, (c) conduct research to empower the individual to self-manage the work-family interface, and (d) engage in advocacy and collaborative policy research to change institutional contexts and break down silos. Increased partnerships between industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology practitioners and researchers from many industries and disciplines could break down silos that we see as limiting development of the field.

The costs and benefits of working with one's spouse: A two‐sample examination of spousal support, work–family conflict, and emotional exhaustion in work‐linked relationships

SummaryAlthough the prevalence of employees working within the same workplace or occupation with their spouse has increased, relatively little research has examined their experiences. On the basis of the boundary and conservation of resources (COR) theories, we argue that higher levels of work–family role integration among work‐linked couples will lead to higher levels of spousal support resources and lower levels of work–family conflict. This will, in turn, lead to lower emotional exhaustion among employees in a work‐linked relationship. Among two samples of employees in a variety of occupations, we found that being in a work‐linked relationship was associated with both higher spousal instrumental support as well as different forms of work–family conflict. The interaction between spousal support and work–family conflict was associated with emotional exhaustion. We discuss the implications of these findings for boundary and COR theories in terms of movement of resources across work–family boundaries and resource relevance in the strain process. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Meaning and Structure in the Work and Family Interface

This article explores the work and family life of dual-earner parents, how they manage these commitments and how they respond to competing demands on their daily life. The analysis of qualitative data suggests that parents manage the work-family boundaries according to the specific meaning that they attach to these spheres of daily life, but it also points to employment structures informing parents’ ‘focus’ on work and family and equally shaping these boundaries. Hence, this article assesses the relevance of these boundaries and how families mediate work and home. This mediating position is analysed through an approach whereby social and economic constraints become parameters informing parents’ sense of self and the meanings used in the work and home articulation. Then, the symbolic side of the work-family interface becomes crucial to understand issues concerning the meaningful order of daily life and the emotional attachments of families to these domains. On this point, I argue that mechanistic approaches to the work-family articulation that take in consideration solely chronometric parameters cannot explore these issues as deeply. This article then advocates a qualitative approach to the work-family interface in order to understand better its cultural co-ordinates and contexts.

Impact of Medical Mistakes: Navigating Work–Family Boundaries for Physicians and Their Families

In today's society, medical liability claims have skyrocketed and physicians are often held accountable for the error whether or not they are directly involved (Rosenthal & Sutcliffe, 2002). Althou...

Time and the Negotiation of Work–Family Boundaries

The article reproblematizes time in relation to the concept of the ‘extended present’ by drawing upon empirical material from a methodological study of work–family boundaries, the article examines the effects of workplace change in a call centre on employees’ negotiation of these boundaries. Through detailed analysis of one of the cases discussed it shows how a female employee and her partner blur the boundaries between work and family life and how the woman concerned felt that she exercised control over time but also felt driven by it. The article sheds insight into the conditions that generate feelings of autonomy and its illusory nature. KEY WORDS • care • organizational change • time • work–family boundaries

Work-Family Relations in Transnational Perspective: A View from High-Tech Firms in India and the United States

This article presents a transnational analysis of work-family relations. Comparing three high-tech firms in India and the United States, we find that employees in each country establish different work-family boundaries. While those in the United States tend to prefer an integration of work and family realms through permeable boundaries, employees in India more often support a separation between work and family spheres through solid boundaries. Our analysis employs a “contextual” view of boundary formation. We argue that work-family relations observed in these U.S. and Indian firms reflect two important factors: 1) varying social contracts between workers, the state, and the private sector, which provide different types of support for families; and 2) varying trends in the persistence or reversal of historical, societal work-family divisions, which create pressures and opportunities either to insulate the household from the workplace, or to merge them together. In contrast to prevailing cultural explanations in the work-family literature that focus on culture or development, we argue for an approach that incorporates global power and inequality. We conclude by discussing implications for transnational debates about work-family. To many observers, the realms of work and family in the United States appear to be converging (Darrah, English-Lueck, and Freeman 2001; Hochschild 1997; Nippert-Eng 1996). As demands of family life and the workplace increasingly compete, activities within these historically distinct institutions often overlap, and have the effect of blurring, if not obliterating, customary boundaries and distinctions. Trends towards globalization suggest that this process may be transnational. These developments prompt several compelling questions. If labor patterns are converging globally (Lincoln and Kalleberg 1990), will this merging of work and family happen in other contries as well? If large corporations are becoming increasingly global, will (or should) their international branches establish work-family arrangements and policies that reflect current developments from their home countries, in our case those of the United States (see also Florida and Keeney 1991 on Japanses firms)? In short, are U.S. workfamily patterns the inevitable model for the rest of the world? This article addresses these questions through a transnational analysis of work-family relations. While the growing literature in this field provides an increasingly nuanced underEarlier versions of this article were presented at meetings of the American Sociological Association, and the Sloan