Work/Personal Life Balance

Managing the demands of both work and personal life has become an important challenge facing most people today, and there has emerged a growing focus on workplace policies geared toward enhanced work/personal life balance. During the span of the past quarter to half century, rapid change in the composition of the family unit, the nature of work, and the function of the worker have together made the concept of work/personal life balance increasingly popular. Yet, settling on a universal or decided definition of work/personal life balance has proven to be an elusive goal of researchers, managers, and employees. This is because the term balance does not necessarily indicate that equal amounts of time and effort are dedicated to the demands of both areas of responsibility. Defining what effectively constitutes work/personal life balance has nevertheless become the source of much inquiry throughout the workplace and among the workforce.

Changing roles for men and women have complicated the management of work/personal life balance in recent decades.

One reason for this relatively recent phenomenon is that work life and personal life had been historically treated as independent areas of study. Plenty of social science, business, and related literature regarded work and personal life, or “home life,” as two separate domains in which an individual could function productively in one domain without undue influence from or on the other domain. But by the mid-to-late 20th century, this concept was increasingly eroded by theories that argued for a link between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in people's work and personal lives.

Although there exist various models of work/personal life balance, they generally accept that work has an impact on home life and vice versa. Among [Page 1723]one strand of assumptions is that what occurs in one domain can positively or negatively influence—or “spill over” to—the experiences, behaviors, and attitudes in the other domain. A similar, though separate, set of research proposes that any needs, experiences, pleasures, and the like that lack in one domain could be compensated for in the other domain. An additional model advocates that one domain is a means by which to facilitate or obtain effects in the other domain. This model finds its philosophical underpinnings in the works of John Dewey, Emile Durkheim, and Robert Merton, who largely claimed that a certain environment or things within an environment can be used as tools to achieve an outcome or solve a problem in another environment. For instance, work could serve as a means to achieving a certain standard of living or quality of life. Examples aside, yet another model views work/personal life balance as a “conflict.” This suggests that the norms of both highly demanding domains are incompatible to a point that the individual must make sacrifices in one domain to satisfy requirements in the other domain.

While such models of work/personal life balance differ to some extent, they each seek to provide an understanding of the relationships and causes and responses that result in whatever balance between the work and home-life domains. But where research to support these propositions exists, the efforts to confirm or refute such models have not yielded consistent results because application of each model is rather contingent on the range of individual and situational factors within the numberless workplaces. So it is that another branch of literature, which has examined the boundaries between work and personal life, could contribute to a better understanding of work/personal life balance. The frameworks from this body of knowledge convey the substance of the many roles that an individual is likely to juggle between work and personal life.

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