UK Employed Women’s Experiences of Role-control Nuances (Decision Choice; Emotive Willingness) and Emotional-Experience Around Conflicting Work & Life

Abstract

Using role adjustment/boundary management theory, this paper uncovers the nuances of role-control as underexamined phenomena and the emotional consequences, around working women’s conflicts between work and life. Thirty-four semi-structured interviews around 210 captured photographs, enabled active, participant-led, and collaborative data collection leading to in-depth, detailed, and rich insights of women’s experiences. Findings revealed that woman applied various types of role-control negotiations (role-integration; segregation), through different individualised/organisational means. Individualised role-control enabled protection of work through temporal (creating space at different daily-times) and contingent (resource-access) solutions, with negative emotional consequences. Alternatively, role-control accessed through HR organizational policies, underpinned decision-choice and psychological factors (e.g., [un]willingness) based on women’s flexibility in separating from work, for family and personal-time, with also positive emotional consequences. The paper serves an awareness-raising purpose for HR/workplaces, of the not-so-obvious work-life conflict pressures facing women and the need for greater organisational-wide transparency/management awareness of women’s nonwork role-conflict consequences and requirements.