Keeping work and private life apart: Age‐related differences in managing the work–nonwork interface

Abstract

Initial evidence suggests that older workers enjoy higher work-life balance than young workers. Yet little is known about the mechanisms of this effect or the robustness of age differences when accounting for differences in life context. We introduce and test the boundary management account of aging and work-life balance, which suggests that older workers maintain stronger work-nonwork boundaries as a pathway towards work-life balance. Both in Study 1 (cross-sectional; N = 298 bank employees) and in Study 2 (aggregated diary entries; N = 608 workers), older workers reported better work-life balance and stronger boundaries at work than young workers; and stronger boundaries at home (Study 1). In both studies, stronger boundaries were related to better work-life balance, and boundary strength mediated the relationship between age and work-life balance. Study 2 additionally suggests that the use of boundary management strategies is responsible for stronger boundaries at higher age. Analyses accounted for differences in family and work context characteristics (both studies), and boundary preferences (Study 1). The findings corroborate evidence of older workers' enhanced work-life balance and suggest that it results from more successful boundary management with age rather than merely from changes in contextual factors or boundary preferences.

Employee age moderates within-person associations of daily negative work events with emotion regulation, attention, and well-being

“…The current findings, along with earlier research on older workers' coping, well-being, and work-life balance (Hertel et al, 2015;Johnson et al, 2013;Scheibe et al, 2016;Spieler et al, 2018) suggest that beliefs about ageing workers as being low in emotional resilience (Rauschenbach et al, 2012) are invalid. Correcting invalid negative stereotypes about older employees is important to prevent ageism in the workplace (Ng & Feldman, 2012).…”

Managing boundaries between work and non‐work domains: Personality and job characteristics and adopted style

“…That is, personality influences our job choices (Wang, Jome, Haase, & Bruch, 2006), and hence indirectly influences the work characteristics we have to contend with and the centrality of roles, which feed more directly into boundary management. Furthermore, while we focused on personality, it is likely that other individual characteristics may relate to boundary management behaviours, including ability and skill‐based differences (perhaps those higher in cognitive ability manage roles differently than those lower on the construct), or motivational orientations (potentially those with avoidant orientations enact stricter role boundaries than those of approach orientations) or other personal characteristics (e.g., Spieler, Scheibe, and Stamov Robnagel (2018) found older workers set stronger boundaries).…”

Overwhelmed by Emotional Job Demands in High Vigor Days! Its Detrimental Effects on Daily Recovery from Work among Health-Care Workers

“…This indicates that older workers had greater levels of control of their leisure time. This result could be explained to the extent that as age progresses, it is possible that people have learned more strategies to control and manage their free time, or to segment the different domains of their lives (Spieler et al, 2018). Meanwhile, in the case of professionals who have children, their time may be more controlled by the demands that childcare requires and not so much by their own demands (Håkansson et al, 2016).…”