Adapting boundary preferences to match reality of hybrid work: A latent change score analysis☆

Abstract

The hybrid work trend, where employees work from home and from the workplace, brings substantial changes to how employees manage their work and family lives, as well as the boundary between those roles. An important yet overlooked question is how hybrid workers, whose work environment overlaps with their home environment for at least part of every work week, navigate and adapt to work-family stressors over time. Drawing upon adaptation theory and boundary theory, we examine how work-family conflict triggers changes in boundary integration preferences, which further contribute to changes in work-family balance satisfaction. Moreover, we investigate the moderating role of spousal interaction, examining ways it shapes the preference-satisfaction relationship. We collect multi-source (hybrid workers and spouses) and multi-wave (two time points over a year) data to test the hypothesized relationships using latent change score analysis. The results suggest that hybrid workers experience increases in both work and family boundary integration preferences due to work-family conflict over time, and increased integration preferences further contributed to increases in work-family balance satisfaction. We also found that spousal interaction enhances the positive relationship between hybrid workers' increased family integration preferences and increased work-family balance satisfaction. This study illuminates nuanced and dynamic evidence of adaptation regarding the interface of the work and family domains, thus providing novel insights into work-family dynamics for an increasingly popular work arrangement – hybrid work.