Who moved my boundary?: strategies adopted by families working from home
Who moved my boundary?: strategies adopted by families working from home
With the increase of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be expected that soon a great number of households will consist of more than one teleworker. This raises the question of how to manage work and nonwork boundaries for the collective of household members who work from home. To better understand the adjustment to collective work from home, we examined the experiences of 28 dual-income households with school-age children residing in five countries. In doing so, we found specific strategies that families used to manage boundaries between two or more household members' work, learning, and home domains. We identified four strategies to define boundaries in the collective (i.e., repurposing the home space, revisiting family members' responsibilities, aligning family members' schedules, and distributing technology access and use) and five strategies to apply boundaries to accommodate the collective (i.e., designating an informal boundary governor, maintaining live boundary agreements, increasing family communication, incentivizing/punishing boundary respect/violation, and outsourcing). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for remote work and boundary management.
Boundary management, Dual-earner household, Dual-income couple, School-age children, Work-family research, Work-nonwork interface
Shirmohammadi, Melika
08b4c9e0-4f76-486f-b4c5-f25528476711
Beigi, Mina
2986037e-5bb3-4ec0-be55-bf291ac17e24
Au, Wee Chan
1ce0f0c6-0376-4f94-bd5c-e54084e3138a
Tochia, Chira
0e06b413-1436-4455-afeb-22a6583a8d7c
June 2023
Shirmohammadi, Melika
08b4c9e0-4f76-486f-b4c5-f25528476711
Beigi, Mina
2986037e-5bb3-4ec0-be55-bf291ac17e24
Au, Wee Chan
1ce0f0c6-0376-4f94-bd5c-e54084e3138a
Tochia, Chira
0e06b413-1436-4455-afeb-22a6583a8d7c
Shirmohammadi, Melika, Beigi, Mina, Au, Wee Chan and Tochia, Chira
(2023)
Who moved my boundary?: strategies adopted by families working from home.
Journal of Vocational Behavior, 143, [103866].
(doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2023.103866).
Abstract
With the increase of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be expected that soon a great number of households will consist of more than one teleworker. This raises the question of how to manage work and nonwork boundaries for the collective of household members who work from home. To better understand the adjustment to collective work from home, we examined the experiences of 28 dual-income households with school-age children residing in five countries. In doing so, we found specific strategies that families used to manage boundaries between two or more household members' work, learning, and home domains. We identified four strategies to define boundaries in the collective (i.e., repurposing the home space, revisiting family members' responsibilities, aligning family members' schedules, and distributing technology access and use) and five strategies to apply boundaries to accommodate the collective (i.e., designating an informal boundary governor, maintaining live boundary agreements, increasing family communication, incentivizing/punishing boundary respect/violation, and outsourcing). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for remote work and boundary management.
Text
Who Moved My Boundary? Strategies Adopted by Families Working from Home
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Accepted/In Press date: 20 March 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 24 March 2023
Published date: June 2023
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
We thank Idaho State University for supporting this study with an internal small research grant. We thank Azadeh Hashemian, a nonfiction writer and translator, who helped us with data collection from our Iranian participants.
Funding Information:
We thank Idaho State University for supporting this study with an internal small research grant. We thank Azadeh Hashemian, a nonfiction writer and translator, who helped us with data collection from our Iranian participants.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Elsevier Inc.
Keywords:
Boundary management, Dual-earner household, Dual-income couple, School-age children, Work-family research, Work-nonwork interface
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 477594
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/477594
ISSN: 0001-8791
PURE UUID: f2991399-3295-4c42-8811-b2458a3e9385
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Date deposited: 09 Jun 2023 16:32
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:47
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Contributors
Author:
Melika Shirmohammadi
Author:
Wee Chan Au
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