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Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, this study aims to explore the indirect effect of work/family boundary violations on teleworkers’ counterproductive work behavior (CWB). In addition, it examines the moderating role of involuntary teleworking in this context.

Based on the diary study method, this study used 543 questionnaires collected from 122 teleworkers in China.

The findings indicate that working time demands mediate the relationship between work boundary violations and teleworker CWB, and threats to family roles mediate the relationship between family boundary violations and teleworker CWB. In addition, involuntary teleworking positively moderates the relationship between work boundary violations and working time demands, as well as the relationship between family boundary violations and threats to family roles.

The study makes several valuable contributions to the extant literature. First, it enhances research on the antecedents of teleworker CWB. Second, by introducing two mediating variables corresponding to two types of boundary violations, the paper provides new insights and a fresh understanding of the effects of boundary violations in teleworking situations. Third, by considering the moderating role of involuntary teleworking, this research adds to the current knowledge on the impact of discussing boundary violations solely on teleworking or traditional office days.

The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal was one of the largest examples of organizational wrongdoing in corporate history, costing the firm immense damage to its reputation and over $33 billion in fines, penalties, financial settlements, and buyback costs. In this paper, we draw on the concept of boundary work to provide insight into the causes of wrongdoing at VW. Supplementing other work on the scandal, we show how the ways in which boundaries became established in the organization resulted in an internal context that defined “in” and “out” groups, normalized certain behaviors, and limited communication across intraorganizational boundaries. This allowed wrongdoing to not only become established but also to go unchallenged. We provide contributions to broader understandings of organizational wrongdoing and to the temporal unfolding of boundary work by theorizing how a combination of cognitive, horizontal, and vertical boundaries can create an infrastructure of organizational design that permits organizational wrongdoing, prevents it being challenged, and ultimately normalizes it in everyday activities.

This qualitative study is grounded on in-depth interviews with 30 Western women self-initiated expatriate (SIEs) currently living and working in the UAE. When selecting the interviewees, the author used purposeful sampling to ensure a diverse sample of interviewees with respect to nationality, age, gender and occupation.

The present study, drawing on boundary theory, aims to investigate the work–life balance (WLB) of Western women SIEs regarding how these women construct and manage the borders between the non-work and work lives in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The results demonstrate that women SIEs experience conflicts and enrichment during overseas employment. Both directions – the impact flowing from working life to personal life and vice versa – were significant. Different career and life phases appeared to be crucial to these experiences. The study also found that some women SIEs in the UAE experience high pressure in the WLB approaches, which are primarily impacted by the specific work–life environment in the UAE. Mostly, work–life boundaries are culturally and socially induced. Hence, many women SIEs encounter disparities between the robust work–life separations in the home country compared to the host country; women SIEs, therefore, need to relax the boundaries to adapt to the competitive work–life environment in the UAE.

The present study contributes to research on work–life boundary management approaches in local settings, such as UAE, by analyzing cross-cultural and individual dimensions. Moreover, although women are still a minority among SIEs, the number of women is increasing. As prior studies have mainly focused on male SIEs, more research is required focusing specifically on women with overseas jobs. The present study endeavors to fill this research gap.

This study aims to incorporate theory on effort-recovery and stressor-detachment models to examine the roles of relaxation, mastery and types of control on the relationship between psychological detachment from work and boundary violations at home.

This study analyzes data from two time points using a sample of 348 working mothers recruited from Prolific.

Working moms who psychologically detach from work have less work boundary violations at home. There are mixed findings on whether and when the other types of recovery experiences moderate the relationship between psychological detachment and boundary violations at home. Relaxation, control after work and job autonomy do not moderate the effect while mastery and boundary control do. Specifically, psychological detachment is more effective as reducing boundary violations at home for working moms who have (1) low levels of mastery and (2) high levels of boundary control.

Working mothers juggle multiple roles and often have increased stress and less time to manage the two domains. The findings of this study illustrate whether and when psychological detachment from work acts as a key to recovery from work-based stressors.

Much of the research on recovery experiences is based on employees without consideration of motherhood status. Further, scholars have not examined the combinative potential of recovery experiences. Finally, examining control over both domains (vs. one domain) adds precision to the literature.

This study explores the professional work of managers in professional service firms (PSFs) by focusing on the relational position of managers as they interface between diverse groups of actors and navigate a multiplicity of accountabilities.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of managers in a Brazilian PSF, this study demonstrates through observations, interviews and shadowing how PSF managers address multiple accountabilities in the conduct of professional work.

To navigate multiple accountabilities, PSF managers perform several forms of boundary work, which the authors conceptualize as “revamping” and “remolding” operations and “translating” and “transforming” understandings. The form of boundary work performed depends on the configuration of two elements of accountability demands: knowledge orientation and extent of exposure. Although analytically distinct, these elements intertwine, suggesting the need for a dynamic perspective on accountability. The analysis shows that professional work extends beyond fixed or passive views of hierarchical and intrinsic accountability to emphasize that managers exude accountability of an adaptive nature.

This study illustrates and theorizes the role of boundary work in PSFs, develops its link to accountability, and identifies its scholarly and practical affordances and limitations for understanding managers’ professional work when navigating multiple accountabilities.

The findings reveal perspectives and behaviors of managers embedded in PSFs, illustrating their unstructured and agentic experiences of accountability and boundary work in practice. The insights can be extended to other contexts where managers face multiple accountabilities in conducting professional work.

This study aims to examine the complex relationship between the personality meta-traits of stability and plasticity and time-based work–family conflict (WFC). Stability and plasticity are hypothesized to influence WFC directly and indirectly, via boundary strength at work (BSW) and boundary strength at home (BSH) domains. WFC has two dimensions – conflict due to family interfering in work (FIW) and conflict due to work interfering in family (WIF).

Data was collected from 419 full-time employees in multiple US companies. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Stability was associated with lower levels of WFC and stronger boundaries around the work and home domains. BSW mediated the relationship between stability and FIW; BSH mediated the relationship between stability and WIF. plasticity was associated with weaker boundaries around the work and home domains. BSW and BSH had a negative relationship with FIW and WIF, respectively.

The study is cross-sectional and limited to time-based work–family conflict. The results support the adoption of a more agentic view of personality in the boundary setting and WFC literatures.

Employers need to design flexible work programs that offer employees control over work–home boundary strength.

The study links stability and plasticity to WFC. It expands the nomological network of work–home boundaries.

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.

Work–nonwork policies and practices provide support for employee well-being, as well as a competitive advantage that can help differentiate organizations. However, not all work–nonwork policies and practices are effective, utilized, or relevant. In this chapter, the authors introduce “organizational boundary management strategy” as a way to leverage these policies and practices, making them more widely adopted and more effective. Organizational boundary management strategy refers to how an organization as a whole tends to support workers’ work–nonwork boundaries (i.e., via segmentation, integration, or somewhere in between). Although boundary management has historically tended to focus on how individuals navigate distinctions between work and personal life, the authors extend boundary management to the organization to suggest how understanding and aligning the organization’s overall boundary management strategies can support worker well-being. To expound on this, the authors present a model suggesting how organizational boundary management can be used to support worker well-being.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

COVID-19 forced employees to work remotely. Since this shift from physical to remote working was sudden and unprecedented, the authors aimed to examine the impact of employee well-being on performance in the context of remote work. Further, the authors explored how feelings of professional isolation and employees' control over their personal and professional boundaries (i.e. boundary control) moderated the well-being and performance link. The authors invoke the equity theory and boundary theory to augment their hypotheses.

With 218 full-time employees representing large information technology organisations in India, the authors tested the hypothesised relationships using regression and double moderation in the PROCESS macro.

Results indicate that well-being has a significant positive impact on employee performance as they worked remotely. Further, the authors found that professional isolation and boundary control moderated the link between well-being and performance such that when boundary control is high and professional isolation is low, the aforementioned relationship strengthened and vice versa.

The authors extend the boundary theory as the crisis-induced remote work highlighted the employees' need for deploying alternating boundary management styles to balance their personal and professional lives.

Organisations must develop flexible work policies to facilitate remote work and managers must efficiently craft the overall management of professional isolation and employees' boundaries to boost their well-being and performance.

The authors not only examine the impact of employee well-being on performance in the context of remote work but also, in a first, examine the role of boundary control and professional isolation in this relationship.