Control over work-life boundaries creates crucial buffer to manage after-hours work stress

June 25, 2020

Science Daily/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

Workers with greater boundary control over their work and personal lives were better at creating a stress buffer to prevent them from falling into a negative rumination trap, says a new study by experts who study occupational stress and employee well-being.

When work intrudes after hours in the form of pings and buzzes from smartphone alerts, it can cause spikes of stress that lead to a host of adverse effects for workers, including negative work rumination, poor affect and insomnia.

But according to research co-written by a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who study occupational stress and employee well-being, those who have greater "boundary control" over their work and personal lives were better at creating a stress buffer that helped protect them from falling into a negative-rumination trap.

Information communication technologies such as smartphones and tablets enable employees to work anywhere and anytime, thereby blurring work and nonwork boundaries. But that convenience comes at the expense of increased stress and mental health woes for workers unless they have control over the boundaries between work and nonwork life, said YoungAh Park, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

"Most people simply can't work without a smartphone, tablet or laptop computer," she said. "These technologies are so ubiquitous and convenient that it can lead some people to think that employees have to be always on or always available. Clearly, this kind of after-hours intrusion into the home or personal life domain is unhealthy, and our research shows that an always-on mentality has a big downside in the form of increased job stress."

In the study, Park and co-authors surveyed more than 500 full-time public school teachers in grades K-6 to measure their off-the-clock work intrusion via technologies on a weekly basis for five consecutive weeks.

"We asked about their weekly work intrusion involving technology, specifically their after-hours work -- whether they were expected to respond to work-related messages and emails immediately, and whether they were contacted about work-related issues after hours," she said.

The researchers found that teachers' adoption of technological boundary tactics such as keeping work email alerts turned off on smartphones was related to lower perceptions of the weekly work intrusion.

The study builds on recent scholarship on how coping with off-hours occupational demands is becoming an increasingly important issue for workers, said Yihao Liu, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois and a co-author of the study.

"Managing your work-life balance through boundary control is not only helpful for you and your family, it also could be a benefit for your co-workers, because they also have to potentially read and respond to the back-and-forth messages that people are sending after the workday is done," he said. "Setting a good boundary between work and regular life is going to help more people and more stakeholders. Overall, it's critical that individuals manage their work-life boundaries for their own health and well-being, but also for their own productivity and their colleagues' productivity."

Moreover, the researchers found that teachers' boundary control softened the work intrusion-negative rumination link and that this boundary control was an important mechanism by which two "border keepers" -- principals, who effectively functioned as supervisors in the study; and parents, who could be thought of as clientele -- can affect teachers' weekly stress experiences.

In other words, the weekly strain symptoms involving work intrusion can be alleviated by a supervisor who supports employees' work-life balance, Park said. Or conversely, it can be aggravated by clientele who expect employees to be always accessible and available.

"A really important point around the sense of boundary control is that stakeholders can influence employees' control," she said. "Our study suggests that school principals can play a positive role in that their support for work-life balance was associated with the teachers' greater sense of boundary control. When you have supportive leaders who model behaviors for work-life balance and work effectively with employees to creatively solve work-life conflicts, that translates into less stress for teachers through boundary control."

Although the study only included elementary school teachers in its sample, the findings about drawing clear boundaries after work ought to apply to most workers, especially now that more are working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers said.

"Our initial motivation was to study teachers because we tend to assume that their work and nonwork lives are separate and distinct," Park said. "Teachers have set schedules in a physical building, along with discrete blocks of free time over the weekends. But even with this working population, we found that after-hours work intrusion via technology can be really stressful for them. So although this finding is particular to teachers, a class of employees who we tend to assume have clear work-life boundaries, it's now an issue for everyone who is electronically tethered to their work after regular hours."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200625122734.htm

New study reveals surprising gender disparity in work-life balance

July 17, 2019

Science Daily/Tokyo University of Science

The concept of work-life balance and its relation to the satisfaction that individuals and groups express regarding the quality of their lives have attracted the attention of policy makers, labor economists, and others. Life satisfaction is central to the general happiness and health of a society or nation. In a new study published in Journal of Happiness Studies, examined data from 34 Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and appraised the effects of different factors on the life satisfaction of both women and men in an effort to close some of the gaps in the existing research on the topic.

In recent years, work-life balance has become a major focus in industrialized economies for both organizations and their employees. In a brief survey of the existing literature, Prof Hideo Noda points out, "Many of the existing studies on work-life balance issues have used micro-level data," whether in terms of company size, gender, management level, stages of individuals' career, and so forth. He adds, "Because the implementation of work-life balance policies is an international trend in many 'developed countries,' identifying common characteristics across developed countries using internationally comparable data has the potential to yield findings that are beneficial for many countries, rather than being limited to just a few countries."

Accordingly, Prof Noda assembled data from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index in an effort to develop a "macro-level" perspective on "life satisfaction elasticity," which is a measure of changes in life satisfaction resulting from changes in efforts to improve work-life balance. Over a database representing both women and men in 34 OECD countries, Professor Noda analyzed the effects of other factors: self-reported health, long-term unemployment, and income inequality.

Prof Noda mentions that previous studies have taken an economic approach and have concluded that, in manufacturing firms, for example, efforts to improve work-life balance, including the introduction of "family-friendly" practices, correlated with improved productivity and life satisfaction. One sociological study using data from European countries found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that working hours correlated with "work-life conflict" or "work-family conflict." A similar European study for found a similar impact of working hours, with Norway and Finland exhibiting the lowest levels of negative impact. Another, larger study of 25 European countries found that workplace autonomy and flexibility varied widely in the impact on work-life with most negative impact in Eastern European countries, along with the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Italy. Finally, several legal studies have described a wide variety of work-life-related practices: family leave, childcare, and labor standards are most favorable in Canada and the European Union; and Japan has an extensive legal framework that supports families, but has yet to address the traditional division of labor according to sex, with men working and women tending to domestic responsibilities.

Prof Noda sought to increase the number of countries included in his study sample and chose the following measures: leisure and personal time; self-reported health; and long-term unemployment. Respondents were asked to score their quality of life on a scale of 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible). The data generated were analyzed separately for women and men.

Leisure and personal time -- the indicator for work-life balance -- was highest among European Union member countries, with Norway and Denmark scoring notably high on life satisfaction as well as leisure and personal time. Over all 34 countries, scores were similar for women and men.

Prof Noda also found a rough correlation between GDP and life satisfaction in higher-GDP countries, e.g., EU countries, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Canada, and the United States.

Prof Noda then turned to income inequality, as measured "within-country" or domestic (among the residents of individual countries) and "between-countries," i.e., international (comparing individual countries with the OECD aggregate). From 2002 to 2005, between-country inequality increased somewhat while within-country inequality showed a more significant increase, leaving Prof Noda to conclude that the rise in international inequality was largely the result of increasing within-country inequality. When income inequality is included in the analysis (Noda's "extended model") the additional factor did not have a meaningful impact. While it is perhaps obvious, as Prof Noda writes, "For people with low levels of happiness . . . income inequality is a serious problem . . . we may not find a significant association between actual income inequality and life satisfaction."

One surprising finding of Prof Noda's study is that although work-life balance accommodations are usually aimed at women's concerns, men, in fact, demonstrate a higher elasticity, especially for personal and leisure time. This suggests that the time devoted to leisure and personal care is more important to men than it is to women.

In the future, policies that enhance individuals' life satisfaction can play a major role in improving both productivity and the general well-being of a population. Prof Noda maintains, "The findings of this study could provide useful suggestions for labor policy design in OECD countries." On the other hand, although income inequality did not register as statistically significant, more research, accounting for additional variables, may be necessary.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190717105258.htm