Navigating Work and Life Boundaries: Insights for Distributed Knowledge Professionals

Chapter 1: Introduction / Overview

Companies are struggling to provide a balanced environment for workers that meets both the needs of the company and the needs of employees.  Work-life balance (WLB) could be construed as the absence of work life conflict (WLC) (Sarker, Xiao, Sarker, & Ahuja, 2012).  While not always recognized as important, WLB has been attributed with helping to reduce employee turnover, alleviate stress, increase job satisfaction, and increase productivity (McCarthy, Darcy, & Grady, 2010).  Initially this was thought to be a gender issue, primarily impacting women and their desire to be a part of their children's lives (Land & Taylor, 2010).  However, younger generations are professing a stronger desire to work to live, rather than live to just work (Land & Taylor, 2010). 

This chapter will provide an overview of the literature surrounding WLB and how companies are currently addressing this important issue.

Chapter 2: Definition of Work Life Balance

WLB and WLC can be simply defined as the ability of a staff member to balance the needs of work with the needs of home in a way that does not cause conflict or undue stress (Sarker et al., 2012).  An earlier study measured work-life quality with indicators including career satisfaction, organizational commitment, and general job satisfaction (Igbaria, Parasuraman, & Badawy, 1994).  Other authors speak of the goal of this relationship as being 'harmonious' (Nord et al., 2002), free from conflict (Poelmans et al., 2009), and reducing WLC (Sarker et al., 2018).  This recognizes the time boundaries of the relationship between staff person and employer in that the employer has contracted for the attention of the employee for a portion of their time, not all of it (Felstead, Jewson, Phizacklea, & Walters, 2002).

Chapter 3: Impacts of Work Life Balance: Why Should Organizations Care?

Researchers have suggested that lack of WLB can lead to many negative consequences for both the employee and the employer.  Of particular concern to employers are issues such as missing work, turnover intentions (Joseph, Ng, Koh, & Ang, 2007; Netemeyer, Brashear-Alejandro, & Boles, 2004), and diminished productivity (Poelmans et al., 2009).  The potential negative impact, especially on turnover and missed work days, has increased as the economy has become more dependent on knowledge and services (Poelmans et al., 2009).  This potential negative impact is likely due to client-specific knowledge held by the employee that may or may not be captured by the employer's knowledge management system (Ahuja, Chudoba, Kacmar, Mcknight, & George, 2007).  Although for many years it was presumed that work-life conflict was connected to employee performance, empirical evidence in most countries has not been able to support that assertion (Sarker et al., 2018).  Within a distributed work environment, these negative impacts are exacerbated due to working through multiple time zones, cultures, and geographical spaces.  This chapter will present research-based evidence of the various negative impacts for organizations when employees do not achieve a healthy WLB.

Chapter 4: What Causes Work Life Conflict?

While there are many potential causes for WLC, they tend to fall into two distinct categories, those of individual differences (Faraj & Sproull, 2000) and organizational requirements (Sarker et al., 2018).  Differences between individuals that have been explored include employees having personal commitments such as young children or other stressful situations at home (Ahuja, Goyal, Saunders, & Rutkowsi, 2015), experiencing gender impacts where the society may not encourage women working late (Sarker et al., 2018), exhibiting particular personality traits that may lend themselves to stress (Poelmans et al., 2009), and feeling as if they are unable to set and control boundaries to delineate between work life and personal space (Sarker et al., 2012).  The second category, organizational supports, presents many additional potential causes of WLC (Poelmans et al., 2009).  Some roles appear to cause increased stress and therefore increased WLC.  These roles include situations where work is distributed among multiple locations (often in multiple time zones) requiring an additional layer of coordination and potential time commitments beyond a typical work day (Nidumolu, 1995; Sarker & Sahay, 2004), as well as understanding and interpreting multiple cultures.  The method of working and coordination of activities can also have negative impacts, in particular those that require synchronous meetings at odd hours (Carmel, Espinosa, & Dubinsky, 2010).  The amount of dependency between tasks can also increase levels of WLC, especially when the amount of work seems to be overwhelming (Ahuja, 2017; Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985).  This is exacerbated when the requirements for the job are uncertain.  Many thought the introduction of advanced technology would help to reduce WLC, but unfortunately technology has introduced new challenges, in particular feeling the need to always be available, increased blurring of boundaries between work and personal time, and managing employees who have personal compulsions to always be available (Sarker et al., 2018).

Chapter 5: Impacts of Stress onWork Life Balance, Job Performance, and Overall Wellbeing

Stress impacts both the ability of an employee to perform work, employee wellness, and the level of work-life balance an employee can achieve.  Wellness impacts of stress might include both physiological and psychological consequences (Wofford & Daly, 1997), which also have consequences for job performance.  In this chapter we will identify potential sources of stress as well as consequences for both job performance and work-life balance.  Technology-related sources of stress relate to either the use of mobile technologies or the characteristics of the technology itself.  The amount of mobility a worker might have, the frequency of mobile device usage and volume of usage relate to the use of mobile technology.  The characteristics of technology that potentially impact employee stress include portability, accessibility, ability to 'fill in dead spots,' reprocessability, information processing, and synchronicity.  In the midst of these variables are individual differences, as each person has varying levels of stress tolerance (Dany & Livian, 2002), ability to multi-task (Carrier, Cheever, Rosen, Benitez, & Chang, 2009), desire for work-life separation (Kanter, 1977), centrality of work to the employee's life (Dubin, 1956), and personality type (Wayne, Musisca, & Fleeson, 2004).  This chapter explores stress and wellness in the context of work-life balance.

Chapter 6: What Can Help

Many strategies have been proposed for helping employees improve work life balance.  These strategies fall primarily under the following roles: the organization, the supervisor, the family, and the individual in question.  This chapter will expand on the strategies, and opportunities for WLB (as well as for mitigating stress and increasing well-being) as applicable for each of the four groups.  The role of the organization includes such activities as setting appropriate compensation, negotiating WLB strategies with employees, providing integration strategies to help employees navigate between their work and personal lives, and setting policies to help protect employees in order to help them maintain WLB (Sarker et al., 2012).  The roles of the supervisor include supporting the employee in their quest for WLB by providing adequate planning of projects to minimize the need for additional hours, negotiating with individuals individually regarding their specific needs, and communicating ahead of time when additional hours might be required (Sarker et al., 2018).  The individual themselves have a role themselves as well. This role primarily is to speak up and let employers know when their WLB starts to get unbalanced.  Without this feedback, the organization would be unable to meet the needs of the employee.  Therefore, it is imperative that supervisors provide guidance to their employees on ways they might be able to achieve WLB needs in appropriate ways, and advocate for those needs to other organizational stakeholders and top management.

Chapter 7: Future of Work Life Balance