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This paper aims to investigate the idiosyncratic relationships between work and nonwork among dual-career professional couples (DCPCs) intentionally without children, considering individual members' role salience, nonwork responsibilities and care or career orientation.

Interview data from 21 Canadian and American couples (42 individuals) was used to explore the research question: How do DCPCs without children perceive their work-nonwork balance?

DCPCs without children are a heterogenous demographic. Some couples are career oriented, some care oriented, some exhibit both orientations, shaping their experience of work-nonwork balance. Unlike popular stereotypes, they do have nonwork responsibilities and interests outside of their thriving careers. Similar to their counterparts with children, they face conflicts managing work and nonwork domains.

Based on theories of role salience, work-nonwork conflict, enrichment and balance, the authors suggest that analyses of work-nonwork balance should include nonwork activities other than child caring. The authors further propose that the experience of the work-nonwork interface varies according to whether couples are careerist, conventional, non-conventional or egalitarian. The study also demonstrates that work-nonwork experiences are relational in nature and should be explored beyond a strictly individual perspective.

This study is aimed at decoding the impact of supportive leadership behavior (leader–member exchange [LMX]) on job satisfaction (JS) through the mediating role of the work–nonwork interface (work-to-nonwork conflict [WNC] and work-to-nonwork enrichment [WNE]), within the work-from-home context in India.

Multiphased data collected from 232 full-time working Indian dual-working parents (with one or more children) were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Overall, the hypothesized model receives empirical support from the data. LMX positively influenced WNE and simultaneously negatively influenced WNC. WNE, in turn, positively impacted JS, and WNC negatively influenced JS. Results supported only the mediating role of WNE between LMX and JS but not WNC. Women reported greater JS than men, and respondents staying in a joint family reported decreased WNC.

The current study takes a multiphased, multidomain approach to understand the underlying mechanisms of leadership’s impact while working from home.

By adopting a tailored approach, organizations can ensure better alignment between employee goals and the desired outcomes of the organization. This entails considering extended family requirements and designing HR interventions and strategies that accommodate the specific challenges faced by dual-working parents.

This study helps to shed light on the sparsely researched arena of the role of leadership in the work-from-home context, more so for Indian dual-working households. Hence, it makes significant contributions to theory and practice.

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.

This paper aims to provide and meta-analytically investigate a theoretical framework of work–nonwork conflict and its antecedents and outcomes in hospitality management.

This paper adopts the psychometric meta-analytical methods and meta-structural equation modeling methods to synthesize the relationships between work-to-nonwork conflict (WNC) and nonwork-to-work conflict (NWC) and its antecedents and outcomes.

WNC and NWC are found to be correlated with antecedents including social support; positive affectivity and negative affectivity; work characteristics; and outcomes including job-related well-being, life-related well-being, burnout, performance and turnover intentions.

This paper is the very first meta-analysis in International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. It is also the first meta-analysis on the relationship between overall work–nonwork conflict and its antecedents and outcomes in hospitality and tourism.

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.

The authors tested (1) the mediating role of thriving in the association between leader-member exchange (LMX) and work–nonwork balance (WNWB) and (2) the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between LMX and thriving.

Cross-sectional data were collected from six separate participant groups across an eight-month period (n = 522). Data analysis included confirmatory factor analysis to assess the construct validity of the proposed three-factor model. Hierarchical regression and the PROCESS macro were used to test three hypotheses.

The authors found thriving mediated an indirect effect of LMX on WNWB. In addition, we found that the relationship between LMX and thriving was moderated by gender, such that the relationship was found for females. Overall, the authors identified a moderated-mediation effect indicating an indirect effect of LMX on WNWB via thriving for females.

Cross-sectional design suggests their results are theory driven. The authors suggest future studies replicate the study employing experimental designs.

The authors suggest organisations develop programs to enhance leadership and thriving capabilities as tools to manage WNWB.

The authors add to the thriving literature by revealing gender differences in the effectiveness of relational resources (i.e. LMX) in fostering employee thriving. Furthermore, the authors extend the efficacy of thriving beyond the workplace to include WNWB. The authors demonstrate the skills and knowledge acquired at work can be used to lessen the impact of WNWB.

Considerable research has been conducted to highlight women's career decisions to opt-out of corporate positions, but little is said about those who leave to become entrepreneurs. The purpose of this paper is to theorize kaleidoscope career parameters in relation to entrepreneurship stages and demonstrate the role of macro-national context (i.e. government initiatives and cultural practices) in women entrepreneurs' career choices.

The authors interviewed 34 Malaysian women entrepreneurs (MWEs) who were established in their careers and explored the following two research questions: (1) what career parameters are prioritized at different entrepreneurship stages? and (2) how does macro-national context influence women entrepreneurs' careers?

Adopting a kaleidoscope career lens, the authors show that authenticity was prioritized during the initial entrepreneurship stage, while balance and challenge were prioritized during the establishment and business advancement stages, respectively. The authors demonstrate that government support was conducive to women's decision to opt-in and stay in the entrepreneurship path. The findings also denote that cultural practices facilitated women's pursuit of entrepreneurship by encouraging family members to support women entrepreneurs in their career choices and actions.

The qualitative approach enabled us to specify the context-specific meaning women entrepreneurs in our study associated with authenticity, balance, and challenge. In doing so, this research extends the kaleidoscope career model to better understand women's career patterns at different entrepreneurship stages.

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.

Retiring from work used to signify the end of paid employment and a transition to focus on life outside the workplace. From this perspective, the work-life interface may have no relevance for the retired. However, recent changes, particularly resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, suggest that conceptualizations of both retirement and the work-life interface are more fluid, ambiguous, and complex. In this chapter, we first set the scene, reviewing how and why the traditional concept of retirement has changed so dramatically. Drawing on empirical data from contemporary media, we then consider how the current experience of the older worker and retiree are being reframed in neoliberal terms, emphasizing individual responsibility to remain not just fit and healthy but also productive, through a wide range of activities. We then focus on the impact of COVID-19, highlighting how pre-pandemic structural inequalities have been exacerbated, resulting in a range of responses in both levels of retirement and work by older people. We conclude by suggesting that retirement and its work-life interface need to recognize lived experience as dynamic, messy, and varied and implicated in wider structural features of both the economy and society.