Time to Change Hats? Examining the Link Between Employees’ Boundary Crossing Effectiveness and Well-being in Remote Working Context

Abstract

As businesses are going on around the clock, workers often found themselves being interrupted by their supervisors and peers during their non-work hours, and this situation has become a new norm as more and more organizations have implemented remote work and expanded workplaces beyond office-based environment. Workers’ non-work role re-engagement (NWRR), which describes working individuals' ability to redirect attentional resources back to non-work activities following work-related interruptions (Grotto et al., 2021), may have a significant impact on workers’ work-life balance and well-being. This paper investigates the factors that may influence employees. Specifically, the paper proposes that employees’ experience of remote work contributes to their efficacy of work/non-work boundary-crossing effectiveness, which further predicts their NWRR because they are more exposed to work/non-work switching situations and are more familiar with the role-switching process when working remotely. Some moderating factors are also highlighted for their influence on the main effects of remote work experience and NWRR. For example, workers who employ fine-grained boundary maintenance practices, such as setting up buffer zones for role transition and differentiated tone in communication for different types of tasks, are likely to report higher NWRR in remote work settings as they are more used to work/non-work boundary-crossing. In contrast, employees with higher work devotion schema – the ones who consider their work to be the central role (Williams, et al., 2016) are likely to report lower NWRR because they strongly commit to their work identities over their home identities may respond to work intrusions in the emergency mode may have more difficulties to resume their non-work roles.