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A core concept of work–home interface research is boundary permeability – the frequency with which elements from one domain cross, or permeate, the boundary of another domain. Yet, there remains ambiguity as to what these elements are and how these permeations impact important outcomes such as role satisfaction and role performance. The authors introduce a multidimensional perspective of work–home boundary permeability, identifying five forms of boundary permeation: task, psychological, role referencing, object, and people. Furthermore, based on the notion that employee control over boundary permeability behavior is the key to achieving role satisfaction and role performance, the authors examine how organizations’ HR practices, leadership, and norms impact employee control over boundary permeability in the work and home domains. The authors conclude with an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of disorderly environment on consumers’ preferences for boundaries and the mediating effect of personal control in this process.

The authors examined hypotheses in two studies. In Study 1, the authors measured environmental orderliness, preference for boundaries and other control variables like positive and negative emotions. In Study 2, the authors primed participants’ concept of environmental orderliness and measured personal control as well as the same variables in Study 1.

Consumers in disorderly environments prefer bounded logos more compared to those in orderly environments. Personal control mediates the effect of chaotic physical environment on the preference for boundaries. Compared with the counterparts in the orderly environment, consumers in the disorderly environment have a lack of personal control, thus giving the preference to logos with boundaries.

This paper discusses the mechanism of the process that the disorderly environment triggers the individual’s preference for bounded design, which enriches the research related to physical environment in the field of consumer behavior. However, it fails to examine the influence of disorderly environment on the preference for real bounded products and did not discuss the invisible boundary.

The impact of the disorderly environment on consumers’ boundary preferences, which the research focuses on, has further deepened the understanding of the boundaries, and to some extent, the authors filled the research gap in this field.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has (triggered) lots of interest in work from home (WFH) practices. Many organizations in India are changing their work practices and adopting new models of getting the work done. The purpose of the study to look at the boundary-fit perspective (Ammons (2013) and two factors, namely, individual preferences (boundary control, family identity, work identity and technology stress) and environmental factors (job control, supervisor support and organizational policies). These dimensions are used and considered to create various clusters for employees working from home.

K-mean clustering was used to do the cluster analysis. Statistical package for social sciences 23 was used to explore different clusters based on a pattern of characteristics unique to that cluster, but each cluster differed from other clusters. Further analysis of variance test was conducted to see how these clusters differ across three chosen outcomes, namely, work-family conflict, boundary management tactics used and positive family-to-work spillover effect. The post hoc test also provided insights on how each cluster differs from others on these outcomes.

The results indicated four distinct clusters named boundary-fit family guardians, work warriors, boundary-fit fusion lovers and dividers consistent (with previous) research. These clusters also differ across at least two major outcomes like boundary management tactics and positive spillover. The high control cluster profiles like Cluster 3 (boundary-fit fusion lovers) and Cluster 4 (dividers) showed low technostress and higher use of boundary management tactics. Cluster 3 (boundary-fit fusion lovers) and Cluster 1 (boundary-fit family guardians) having high environmental influencers also showed higher positive family-to-work spillover.

Because this study is very specific to the Indian context, a broad generalization requires further exploration in other cultural contexts. The absence of this exploration is one of the limitations of this study. On the culture continuum, countries may vary from being individualistic on one extreme to being collectivistic on the other extreme. Interaction of these two cultural extremities with the individual and the environmental dimension, as espoused in this research, can be examined further in a different cultural setting.

This study has extended the work of Ammons (2013) and added external influencers as a dimension to the individual preferences given by (Kossek 2016), and created the cluster for employees in the Indian context. This study has demonstrated the importance of reduced technostress, and the use of boundary management tactics (temporal and behavioral) leads to positive family-to-work spillover. It has also emphasized the relevance of organization policies and supervisor support for better outcomes in WFH.

This paper aims to identify strategies used by successful teleworkers to create and maintain boundaries between work and home, and to determine how these strategies relate to employee preferences for segmentation or integration of work and home.

Forty in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with employees working from home either occasionally (occasional teleworkers), between 20 and 50 per cent of the workweek (partial teleworkers), or the majority of the time (full teleworkers).

Teleworkers use physical, temporal, behavioral and communicative strategies to recreate boundaries similar to those found in office environments. Although teleworkers can generally develop strategies that align boundaries to their preferences for segmentation or integration, employees with greater job autonomy and control are better able to do so.

A limitation of this research is its potential lack of generalizability to teleworkers in organizations with “always-on” cultures, who may experience greater pressure to allow work to permeate the home boundary.

These findings can encourage organizations to proactively assess employee preferences for boundary permeability before entering a teleworking arrangement. The boundary management tactics identified can be used to provide teleworkers struggling to establish comfortable boundaries with tangible ideas to regulate interactions between home and work.

This research makes a significant contribution to practitioner literature by applying a boundary management framework to the practice of teleworking, which is being adopted by organizations with increasing frequency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the tactics that mid-career professional working mothers use to improve their work-home balance.

The qualitative study used in-depth interviews with 63 Brazilian professional working mothers aged between 37 and 55, having at least one child under the age of 18, and living in dual-career households. The interviews were content analyzed.

The study reported four dimensions of boundary work tactics (behavioral, temporal, physical, and communicative) that mid-career working mothers adopted to construct a satisfying level of segmentation or integration between work and home.

The study suggests individual tactics for actively constructing a generalized work-home state that can be adopted by working mothers. Additionally, the authors suggest that HR managers should develop work-home balance programs that provide policies that adjust to the work-home boundary preferences for those mothers who want to integrate and segment these domains.

The authors hope this study can help mid-career working mothers to understand how they can interact actively with others in such a way that they can better answer their work and home demands.

This study was the first to use boundary work tactics theory to explore how mid-career professional working mothers improve their work-home balance.

Modern working life is characterized by increased expectations for employees to be available to deal with work issues outside regular work hours and by using new communication technology. This implies more individual freedom in organizing work in time and space, but also places increased demands on employees to manage the boundaries between work and personal life. This, in turn, can be expected to be crucial to their ability to mentally detach from work during free time. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether individual perceptions of boundary control moderate the impact of after-hours availability expectations and work-related smartphone use during off-work hours on psychological detachment.

The study population comprised 2,876 gainfully employed professionals from four large organizations in both the public and private sector, representing various businesses and occupations. Univariate correlations and multiple, linear hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed.

High after-hours availability expectations, high frequency of work-related smartphone use, and low boundary control were associated with poor psychological detachment. Furthermore, boundary control moderated the relationships between both after-hours availability expectations and work-related smartphone use, respectively, and psychological detachment. As such, boundary control mitigated the negative effects of both after-hours availability expectations and work-related smartphone use during leisure on psychological detachment.

Modern work organizations would benefit from introducing availability policies and helping employees reduce their work-related smartphone use outside regular work hours, thus helping them achieve successful boundary control and subsequent psychological detachment.

In a working life characterized by blurred boundaries, employees’ ability to achieve boundary control can be regarded as crucial.

The purpose of this study is to identify potential differences in experiences and their causes from a gender-based perspective.

We use secondary data, and we conduct a thematic analysis, to identify whether and how women and men negotiate differently.

Despite remote work being considered as creating a level-playing field for both genders, women are still vulnerable to work and life demands, and pre-existing stereotypes become exacerbated. In addition, we show how technology might be used to manage physical and temporal boundaries, through integration or segmentation tactics.

There is a growing body of literature that focuses on work-life conflict among teleworkers. Yet, there is limited research that explores such conflicts from a gender perspective, specifically whether and how different genders manage boundaries between work and life differently.

The purpose of this paper is to explore managers' boundary setting in order to better understand their handling of time commitment to work activities, stress, and recovery during everyday work and at home.

The paper has qualitatively‐driven, mixed method design including observational data, individual interviews, and focus group discussions. Data were analyzed according to Charmaz' view on constructivist grounded theory.

A first step in boundary setting was to recognize areas with conflicting expectations and inexhaustible needs. Second, strategies were formed through negotiating the handling of managerial time commitment, resulting in boundary‐setting, but also boundary‐dissolving, approaches. The continuous process of individual recognition and negotiation could work as a form of proactive coping, provided that it was acknowledged and questioned.

These findings suggest that recognition of perceived boundary challenges can affect stress and coping. It would therefore be interesting to more accurately assess stress, coping, and health status among managers by means of other methodologies (e.g. physiological assessments).

In regulating managers' work assignments, work‐related stress and recovery, it seems important to: acknowledge boundary work as an ever‐present dilemma requiring continuous negotiation; and encourage individuals and organizations to recognize conflicting perspectives inherent in the leadership assignment, in order to decrease harmful negotiations between them. Such awareness would benefit more sustainable management of healthcare practice.

This paper highlights how managers can handle ever‐present boundary dilemmas in the healthcare sector by regulating their time commitments in various ways.

Does the self-employed nature of entrepreneurs’ business ventures mean that they have perfect boundaries between their work and nonwork lives? Drawing on border theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine entrepreneurs’ work–life balance (WLB) in terms of how they construct and manage the borders between their work and nonwork lives.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach to enhance their insight into entrepreneurs’ WLB using border theory. The study benefits from its empirical focus on Nigerian migrants in London who represent a distinct minority group living in urban areas in the developed world. Data for the study was collected over a three-month period, utilising semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection.

The study’s findings indicate that entrepreneurs prioritise “work” over “life” and reveal that entrepreneurs have little desire for boundaries as they work everywhere, which makes long working hours prevalent among them. Furthermore, the findings bring to the fore the prevalent social anomaly of entrepreneurs preferring to be unmarried, single and even divorced as a result of or associated with the entrepreneurs’ boundaries creation and management.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited and selected sample of the research.

Research on human resource management (HRM) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or businesses in which entrepreneurs operate is still under developed. The issue of the size and the nature of an organisation (i.e. labour or product market influences, ownership structures, etc.) have profound implications for human resources (HR) structures, policies and practices and the quality of the WLB of entrepreneurs. Research on HRM and entrepreneurship is still evolving. Consequently, HRM in several entrepreneurial business ventures is sometimes (if not often) organisationally fluid and ad hoc. The main implication for this work environment is that there may be little structure in HRM policies and processes to help self-employed entrepreneurs in their ability to comprehensively manage border crossing and to achieve WLB.

This paper provides valuable insights into entrepreneurs’ work/nonwork boundaries, which is hugely influenced by the commodification of time and money. It also enriches work–life border theory and its social constructionist perspective.

This research aims to study employees' pandemic-induced work–home boundary violations using the work–home boundary model. Boundary theory and social theories provide the theoretical underpinnings for this study. The authors study the role of gender, gender role ideology, and fear of COVID-19 in explaining the relationship between work–home boundary violations, work–family conflict (WFC), and subjective well-being (SWB) among working professionals.

Data were gathered using an online survey on married and working individuals (N = 354) and analyzed using the multi-group analysis technique in structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results show that men faced higher WFC due to job insecurity, while women reported higher WFC due to traditional gender role ideology. Surprisingly, men reported lower subjective well-being due to WFC compared to women, when fear of COVID-19 was low. One promising finding is the potential in using problem-focused coping strategy (PCS) as a boundary-work tactic for both men and women to ensure boundary control (BC) to reduce WFC and improve SWB during the new normal.

This study contributes to boundary theory, social role theory, and social support resource theory, along with practical implications for employees, organizations, and policymakers.

This study dissects the primary role of problem-focused coping as a valid coping mechanism for managing the issues arising from the pandemic-induced unfavorable working conditions.