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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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how positive affectivity (PA) moderates the indirect effects of positive and negative career shocks – unplanned and often unexpected external events whose effects cannot be anticipated or countered – on thriving via career adaptability.

The authors empirically tested the moderated mediation model with a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. The study was performed with a valid sample of professionals who had experienced work-related career shocks.

The results indicated that career adaptability mediated the effects of positive and negative career shocks on thriving. In addition, the slope of the relationship between negative shocks and adaptability became positive for high levels of PA. The authors also found an indirect effect of negative career shocks on thriving at all levels of PA and importantly, when PA was high, the effects of negative shocks on thriving became positive.

Individuals may use emotional reappraisal strategies to counter negative feelings that accompany negative events to mitigate the negative effects of such events. By strengthening their positivity, individuals facilitate their own perception of shocks, thereby minimizing the possibility of a decrease in adaptability resources.

This paper advances understanding of those mechanisms through which negative shocks lead to positive effects that can help individuals improve their career adaptability and thrive.