Dissertation: A Relational Perspective on Boundary Work: How Attorneys Manage Work-Life Boundaries
Description
Many professionals struggle with managing boundaries between work and life outside of work. For decades researchers have been trying to understand this issue but we still have much to learn about it. With my dissertation, I aim to improve our understanding of boundary work—the process though which people construct, negotiate, place, maintain and change boundaries between their work and personal life. I propose an agentic perspective of boundary work. In a qualitative, inductive study of 70 attorneys at a large law firm, I explore attorneys’ subjective experiences of boundary work. I draw on boundary theory and take a social constructionist approach to learn about what individuals can do to manage their competing demands. My analysis reveals that boundary work takes place in the context of relationships and is fundamentally a relational process. When attorneys face incompatible work and non-work demands, they weigh their desire to meet their non-work demands against their ability to develop and maintain good relationships at work. This relational perspective presents a significant departure from previous research in work-life domain, which focused on organizational policies and culture, or on stable individual differences.
Relationships at work both helped and hindered attorneys in resisting work demands to accommodate non-work plans. Sometimes relationships were a source of help and accommodations for attorneys. Other times, attorneys were concerned about the nature of their relationships with others and about others’ well-being, which hindered their ability to resist work demands or made them more negatively evaluate the outcomes of resisting. Attorneys often effectively addressed their relational concerns while resisting work demands. Still, sometimes attorneys cognitively constructed the process of resisting work demands in ways that made them feel they had no choice but to accept work demands. I explore various aspects of this cognitive construction. These findings contribute to work-life research by introducing a new, relational perspective on boundary work and open a new line of inquiry about effects of cognitive construal on other aspects of organizational life.
For my second study I am developing a survey instrument which will enable me to link the relational aspects of boundary work to outcomes such as work-life conflict, self-reported performance, and turnover intentions.