Work Spillover

Traditional View

The traditional view understands work spillover as a negative impact of work on life. Work, as famously portrayed in Studs Terkel's Working, encroaches on the physical and mental well-being of workers and infringes upon other life pursuits—be they physical recovery, child care, or leisure activities. First and most obviously, work limits the time available for nonwork activities and particularly for caring responsibilities. Flexible working arrangements such as part-time or telework can help address time-related work spillover. Recent workforce surveys show overall satisfaction with working hours, especially among women and working mothers, but as Ken Roberts explains, although time-related work spillover seems to be less of an issue generally, certain groups such as professional workers and managers are still likely to experience negative work spillover as a result of increasing working hours.

Second, work can impact negatively on workers' physical and mental health. With the decline of manufacturing in Europe and North America, the focus has shifted from health and safety rules aimed at preventing accidents toward workers' mental well-being. Work-related stress has become a prime cause for absenteeism and is linked to increasing workloads and work intensification. Stress management programs offered in the workplace or through national health systems aim to help workers reduce such negative work spillover.

Third, information and communication technology has decoupled work from times and locations. Work spills into hours and spaces previously reserved for nonwork activities. Although smartphone and laptop users may not necessarily be working 24/7, they are available outside traditional workplaces and office hours. Linda Duxbury and Rob Smart have found that constantly being available for work diverts attention and energy from nonwork activities and allows work-related stressors to spill over into homes, family holidays, or evenings out with friends. This type of work spillover intensifies conflicts workers experience between their professional personae and their family or community roles.

The traditional view of work spillover assumes that work and life are separate spheres and that spillover from work into nonwork life is negative. Contemporary research increasingly contests these assumptions. Industrial sociology has demonstrated that, for example, for jazz musicians, police, and mining and fishing communities, work and nonwork life heavily mix, each sphere influentially shaping the other. More recently, employers such as Google have designed workplaces in the style of homes or leisure locations in order to facilitate informal, relaxed working relations. Communication technology blurs boundaries between work and nonwork life, and the informal and personalized nature of professional work can make distinctions between work contacts and social networks impossible. In addition, as Nick Isles finds, work can be a major source of satisfaction, stimulation, and self-fulfillment. Arlie Hochschild's Time Bind study famously showed that [Page 997](female) workers' poor uptake of policies aimed at reducing negative work spillover was due to their preference for work over home life.

Contemporary View

Contemporary research acknowledges this complex relationship between work and nonwork life. Christena Nippert-Eng influentially distinguished separators with clear work/life boundaries from integrators who mix locations, contacts, keys, and diaries. As Chris Warhurst and colleagues point out, however, the same degree of work/life separation or integration can be experienced very differently. Smartphones and laptops, for instance, allow flexibly accommodating work with child care or commuting, which can significantly reduce negative work spillover. However, a fair share of the respondents to a U.S. industry survey who e-mailed from their BlackBerrys while in bed and on holiday (60 and 83 percent, respectively) are likely to suffer negative work spillover. To understand such complexities, studies of the impact of work on life now take into account individual work/life perceptions and ambitions, the financial and social capital available for shaping one's work/life situation, along with the corporate structures; employment system; and legal, cultural, and societal norms that enable or constrain work/life experiences. The contemporary view has therefore moved beyond a focus on negative spillover from work into life. It recognizes both negative and positive spillovers between work and life and acknowledges that in certain cases the work/life boundary may well be too blurred to talk about a spillover from one clearly demarcated sphere into another.

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