Research Stories

by Carrie Barnett

Cell phones, PDAs, and laptop computers are the "Trojan Horses" of the modern world. Take them home and they transport work from the office through the walls of our personal lives.

Maintaining a boundary between work and home and between the roles we assume in those places has always been tricky. Some people build those walls high and thick. Others try to take care of business and family by mixing the two together.

Blake Ashforth is a management professor at ASU's W. P. Carey School of Business. He studies these "boundary theory" issues. Ashforth says that people create and maintain boundaries as a means of simplifying and ordering the environment.

Some theorists have described the journey across the boundaries of our roles and our domains as crossing an abyss. That is an apt description for the woman who must shift gears every evening from workplace manager to her role as mother.

How do we deal with the role shifting? Ashforth says that we adapt by either segregating or integrating our roles.

Segregators keep their domains strictly separate. However, they can experience difficulties when the time comes to cross the border to home.

Integrators allow some crossover. For example, some workers allow home issues to impinge on their time at the office.

More and more companies offer perks designed to mediate these work/life issues. It's not as easy as installing an employee weight room or day care center, however. There may be unintended consequences.

"On-site day care might cause working parents to feel that they should visit their children periodically during the workday, thereby interrupting the flow of their work role," Ashforth says. The upshot: compromise of the integrity of both home and work.

"We're leaving this to the individual to sort out. It's hard for any one person to stem the tide [of technology-fueled boundary-crossing]," Ashforth adds. "We've now made personal an organizational problem. But most people don't have the power to re-draw the boundaries."

Learn more about research at the W. P. carey School of Business at: http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu