Research On The Patterns Of Employees' Work And Nonwork Boundary Management Strategies

The work and nonwork boundary management has been widely recognized by scholars and a fruitful of research has been done on this topic.The existing literature has discussed several topics from transit between different boundaries and use of management stratetigies.All these research has both theoretical and practical contributions.However,the conflict between work domain and non work domain has been deepen due to the rapid change of work philosophy and work environment.The further exploration of effective boundary management is urgently needed.Moreover,the majority of current research only focused on the content of boundary strategies themselves.The employees,the subjects who chose and applied the strategies have been ignored.The research gap also needs to be addressed.Based on the review of literature,this research brought up a new theoretical framework which combined the perspectives of different dimensions of boundaries and the integration and segmentation preferences of employees.Eight different categories of boundary management strategies have been developed:the integration-oriented time boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented time boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented physical boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented physical boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented psychology boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented psychology boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented interpersonal boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented interpersonal boundary management strategies.This research has designed 17 qualitative interviews to discover the content of different dimensions of work and nonwork boundaries and the detailed descriptions of 72 boundary management strategies.According to the conclusion of interviews,this research developed a new scale to measure the work and nonwork boundary management strategies.The initial item pool came from the interiviews and has been reduced to 50 items by deleting,combing or revising some items.An explorative analysis has been conducted to screen the items and 29 items has left.To validate the scale,a further confirmative analysis has been conducted and all the validations have met the standards.The final scale includes 8 categories of boundary management strategies:the integration-oriented time boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented time boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented physical boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented physical boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented psychology boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented psychology boundary management strategies,the integration-oriented interpersonal boundary management strategies,the segmentation-oriented interpersonal boundary management strategies.To discuss the use patterns of boundary management strategies among employees,thie research has collected 387 samples by distributing the scale developed in the previous research.By using cluster analysis,four different patterns has been discovered:Combination User Type,Combination User Type ?,High User,Negative User.The first two patterns has no obvious integration or segmentation preferences.The High User displayed high frequency use of all categories of boundary management strategies.On the contrary,the Negative User displayed very few use of all categories of boundary management strategies.To discuss the effects of different boundary management strategies on the work related and nonwork related outcomes,this research has collected 387 samples to test the differences.The results have shown that the negative users has low performance on all the outcomes.The other three types have various performances concerning the different outcomes.The combination user type ? has an overall better performance.In conclusion,the research address the work and nonwork boundary management strategies from a new theoretical perspective which consider the integration and segmentation preference is a compliance of different preferences on the different dimensions of work and nonwork boundary.By applying a mixed research design,this research has obtained abundant results which have richened and expanded current work and nonwork boundary management literature.Considering the detailed descriptions of management strategies and use patterns,this research also has its important practical implications.