Prompting, Facilitating, and Legitimizing: How Work-Life Flexibility Policies and Relational Others Shape Boundary Management

Abstract

As hybrid working blurs boundaries between work and nonwork, it is critical we understand how these boundaries are negotiated by employees. Existing literature establishes that work-life flexibility policies and relational others shape their boundary management, yet the mechanisms through which they do so remain underspecified. Drawing on border theory, we examine how these policies and relational others within and outside work influence the construction of employees' work–nonwork boundaries. Qualitative data were collected from hybrid working academics with varied relational circumstances through interviews aided by photo-elicitation, revealing the complexity of their boundary management. Our findings make three contributions to border theory and HRM scholarship and practice. First, we extend border theory by theorizing the critical mechanisms through which relational others and work-life flexibility policies shape employees' boundary management by prompting, facilitating, and legitimizing boundaries. Second, we reveal the complexity that arises when multiple boundary-keepers act simultaneously, at times reinforcing and at others undermining one another. Third, we offer a more differentiated understanding of how flexible working policies inform employee boundaries in practice, demonstrating that they can also prompt, facilitate, and legitimize these boundaries, or fail to do so. These findings generate important implications for how work-life flexibility policies are designed, implemented, and evaluated.