Work - Family Boundary Characteristics Affect Work - Family Balance

Work and family are the two most important areas in a person’s life; therelationship between them is very complexity. With the changing of working modesand family structure, work and family is no longer two completely separated areas;the boundary between them is becoming vaguer in now days. However, not allindividuals are willing to accept this situation; some people are more inclined tostrictly distinguish the two areas, and play the role of a field in a certain period. In thiscontext, whether the vague boundary will affect the relationship between work andfamily? If the individual isn’t satisfied with objective boundary condition, whetherthere will be a negative impact between them? These issues are worthy to beinvestigated in our study.The study of work-family relationship has more than40year’s history.Work-family conflict is the most important research topics in this field, concerns thenegative effects of work and family; with researchers called on to shift researchparadigm, more and more researchers have begun to pay more attention on thepositive effects of work and family. In recent years, researchers have given emphasisto work-family balance, a comprehensive view to understand the relationship betweenwork and family. Work-family border/boundary theory is an emerging view inwork-family research; concerning the impact of work-family border/boundary on therelationship between work and family. Work-family border/boundary theory haveadopted person-environment fit perspective, not only investigating the objectivework-family boundary characteristics, but also analyzing subjective boundarywillingness, have an important significance to understand the influence of boundarycharacteristics on the relationship between work and family.Therefore, based on person-environment fit perspective and work-familyborder/boundary theory, this study explores the internal structure of the work-familyboundary characteristics, the impact of work-family boundary characteristics onwork-family balance, as well as the influence of fit between objective boundaryflexibility and subjective boundary willingness on work-family balance.First of all, this study get the dimensions of work-family boundary characteristic,the actual state of boundary segmentation, and measurements individuals take tomaintain specific work-family segmentation state through the pre-interview research.Draw on the original scale, this study organized work-family boundary characteristic scale, and also used the revised work-family balance scale in our formal researchquestionnaire. In the formal study,400married working-class employees have beenmeasured, a total of304valid questionnaires were back.It was found that:1. Work-family boundary characteristics have two dimensions: boundaryflexibility and boundary permeability; Boundary flexibility has two aspects:flexibility ability and flexibility willingness; Boundary flexibility affectsboundary permeability.2. Boundary flexibility and boundary permeability have significant impact onwork-family balance.3. The fit between boundary flexibility and individual willingness are very well;but this fit has limited impact on work-family balance.