Managing multiple roles: work-family policies and individuals' desires for segmentation.

As workers strive to manage multiple roles such as work and family, research has begun to focus on how people manage the boundary between work and nonwork roles. This paper contributes to emerging work on boundary theory by examining the extent to which individuals desire to integrate or segment their work and nonwork lives. This desire is conceptualized and measured on a continuum ranging from segmentation (i.e., separation) to integration (i.e., blurring) of work and nonwork roles. We examine the fit between individuals' desires for integration/segmentation and their access to policies that enable boundary management, suggesting that more policies may not always be better in terms of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using survey methodology and a sample of 460 employees, we found that desire for greater segmentation does moderate the relationship between the organizational policies one has access to and individuals' satisfaction and commitment. People who want more segmentation are less satisfied and committed to the organization when they have greater access to integrating policies (e.g., onsite childcare) than when they have less access to such policies. Conversely, people who want greater segmentation are more committed when they have greater access to segmenting policies (e.g., flextime) than when they have less access to such policies. Moreover, the fit between desire for segmentation and organizational policy has an effect on satisfaction and commitment over and above the effects of demographic characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, income, number of children, and the ages of those children.

Key words: work and family; integration; segmentation; person organization fit; job satisfaction; organizational commitment

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Managing multiple roles and identities has long been a concern for individuals in organizations (James 1890, Katz and Kahn 1966, Merton 1957). With the erosion of the notion of work and nonwork as separate worlds (Kanter 1977), the management of multiple roles has become increasingly salient for both individuals and organizations. An emerging body of work known as boundary theory provides a theoretical framework for understanding how people manage multiple roles by focusing on the boundary between their work and nonwork roles (Ashforth et al. 2000, Kossek et al. 1999, Nippert-Eng 1995, Perlow 1998). A number of scholars have studied boundaries, thresholds, and the ways that people demarcate space and time within and across various domains (Michaelson and Johnson 1997, Zerubavel 1991). Thus, the phrase "boundary theory" has been used in various disciplines including education (Tyree 1992), counseling psychology (Hartmann 1997), marketing (Lysonski 1985), and sociology (Nippert-Eng 1995). Our work falls specifically under the heading of boundary theory as coined by Ashforth et al. (2000) in their article on transitions between work and home roles. This research addresses the nature of the boundary between home and work (Nippert-Eng 1995), the ways that people and organizations enact this boundary (Rau and Hyland 2002), and the consequences of particular strategies for boundary management (Perlow 1998). As a theoretical framework, boundary theory contributes to classic theories that seek to understand the outcomes of multiple roles such as role conflict (Merton 1957, Kahn et al. 1964), role strain (Kahn et al. 1964), and role accumulation/enrichment (Sieber 1974, Rothbard 2001). Boundary management strategies have been theorized to fall along a continuum from integration to segmentation of work and nonwork roles (Ashforth et al. 2000, Kossek et al. 1999, Nippert-Eng 1995, Rau and Hyland 2002), where integration refers to the blurring and segmentation to the separation of roles.

Much of the emerging literature on boundary management has been focused on theory building. In a thorough qualitative study of a research and development firm, Nippert-Eng (1995) found that individuals enact different boundary management strategies on a continuum ranging from integrating to segmenting. Kossek et al. (1999) theorized about the many factors, including gender and family status, which may influence an individual's choice to segment or integrate. In their foundational theoretical paper on role transitions, Ashforth et al. (2000) argue that there are costs and benefits to either segmentation or integration. Our work here draws heavily on boundary theory and the theoretical and qualitative research that has helped establish the segmentation-integration distinction as a meaningful continuum for understanding how individuals may choose to manage their multiple roles.

Boundary theory has primarily explored the boundary management strategies that people enact (Ashforth et al. 2000, Nippert-Eng 1995). However, this research has not directly examined people's desires for more segmentation or integration because an implicit assumption has been that these desires are aligned with individuals' strategies for the segmentation or integration of these roles. Although this assumption seems reasonable for the most part, we argue that it is theoretically important to decouple the constructs of desire for and enactment of these boundary management strategies. Decoupling these constructs is important because they may be misaligned. In particular, the organizational context may make one practice more accessible to employees than another, potentially causing a mismatch between desire and enactment. Indeed, having access to one type of strategy and desiring another may signal to the individual that the organizations' values are misaligned with one's own because organizational policies can communicate an organization's values to current and potential employees (Bretz and Judge 1994, Cable and Judge 1994, Rynes 1987). Moreover, just as individual boundary management strategies may be arrayed along the integration-segmentation continuum, past research on boundary theory has suggested that organizational work-family policies can also be arrayed along this continuum (Ashforth et al. 2000, Rau and Hyland 2002). Drawing on the basic tenets of person-organization fit research, we argue that organizational policies can reflect differing values regarding segmentation and integration that may be incongruent with the desires of individuals. Specifically, we suggest that desire for segmentation is an individual value on which fit perceptions can be based. Therefore, under circumstances where there is a mismatch, more policies may not always be better in terms of satisfaction and commitment and may even lead to negative outcomes for some employees.

Theory