Age-Related Differences in Work-Life Balance When Teleworking: The Role of Boundary Management

Retzlaff, Lena (2022) Age-Related Differences in Work-Life Balance When Teleworking: The Role of Boundary Management. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, home-based teleworking has become the new normal in white-collar occupations. Teleworking can make it difficult to balance work and non-work domains, therefore creating and maintaining boundaries is key to managing both domains simultaneously. However, there seems to be a lack of well-defined boundary management tactics for the teleworking context. Thus, the goal of Study 1 was to develop a list of boundary management behaviors and a reliable boundary management scale for the home-office setting. Moreover, research suggests that there are age differences in the use of boundary management tactics and work-life balance; however, this was exclusively examined in the office setting. Therefore, the objective of Study 2 was to examine the mediating effect of boundary management on the relationship between age and work-life balance in telework. The research was conducted online with a two-wave (Study 1) and three-wave study (Study 2), including participants from diverse professional backgrounds. In Study 1 (N = 172), we obtained five reliable subcategories of boundary management tactics, which were replicated in Study 2 (N = 249). Moreover, in Study 2, a significant mediation effect of boundary management was found for the relationship between age and work-life balance, suggesting that boundary management can explain better work-life balance in teleworkers as employees age. These findings offer new insights into the role of boundary management in work-life balance and, in particular, lead to an understanding of which demographic groups in the workforce may need more support in boundary management when teleworking. Keywords: boundary management, boundary management tactics, home-based teleworking, work-life balance, age differences

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Scheibe, S.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	27 Jun 2022 11:26
Last Modified:	27 Jun 2022 11:26
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/616

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