The Professional, the Personal, and the Ideal Worker: Pressures and Objectives Shaping the Boundary between Life Domains

Abstract

Both scholarly literature and popular accounts suggest that modern organizational practices have moved toward encouraging employees to “integrate” or blur the boundary between their personal and professional domains, for example, through self-disclosure at work, company-sponsored social activities or providing on-site child care. Concurrently, an ideology underlying U.S. professional norms discourages integration practices such as referencing non-work roles during workplace interactions, expressing emotions in the workplace, and/or displaying non-work-related items in workspaces. In this review, we posit that these two norms firmly coexist because they differentially serve two objectives corresponding to the parallel bodies of research we examine: one addressing boundary management as a tool for handling role responsibilities, and the other considering boundary management as a tool for shaping workplace identity and relationships. Specifically, we posit that segmenting personal and professional domains facilitates the management of role responsibilities, whereas integration is more beneficial for managing workplace identity and relationships. Furthermore, both objectives serve the “ideal worker” imperative of work primacy. We identify key contingencies that help us to further understand existing research findings, and prompt future research directions informing theories for understanding the attractiveness and efficacy of different personal–professional boundary management strategies for both organizations and individuals.

Acknowledgements

We thank Lakshmi Ramarajan for her generosity in providing thoughtful and insightful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful to editors Laurie Weingart and Francesca Gino for their patience and guidance in helping us develop this article

Notes

1. We acknowledge that flexible scheduling is sometimes characterized as an integrating practice. Importantly, however, the effect of flexible scheduling on the personal–professional boundary is largely determined by the individual's implementation (Piszczek & Berg, 2014). Furthermore, the types of basic flextime policies referenced here, that simply shift the work day a few hours earlier or later, are considered to foster segmentation (Rau & Hyland, 2002; Rothbard et al., 2005), whereas more extreme flexible scheduling practices that allow for greater variability in start time on a day-to-day basis are considered to foster integration (Baltes, Briggs, Huff, Wright, & Neuman, 1999; Dalton & Mesch, 1990; Kossek et al., 2005).