Have you ever wondered what kind of boundary management style you have?  Or have you looked at others and tried to gauge their style compared to yours?  With the help of a recent study it will be easier to understand the different boundary management styles that exist in the modern workforce and where you and your peers fall.

With today’s technology it has become easier in general, and quite easy in certain kinds of jobs, to manage your family needs while at work and your work needs while at home. For nearly everyone there are times when you simply must be physically present and exclusively focused at home, and other times equally so at work. But outside of those times, you develop your own habits and preferences for managing the one set of needs while physically present at the other venue. Those habits and preferences define your boundary-management style.

Ellen Ernst Kossek, a management professor at Purdue University, has released research where she defines the differences in how people handle work-home boundaries. Ms. Kossek has defined three distinct ways that most people manage boundaries—some are Integrators, some are Separators, and some are Cyclers.

If you are an integrator, you blend your home and work lives together:

·         When you wake up in the morning, you grab your phone and check your emails before attending to the family matters you need to address before heading to work.

·         While working out, watching TV, or even having meals, you are reviewing emails, reading work reports, or even taking work calls.

·         While dealing with family matters, such as picking up the kids from school, you are reviewing emails as you patiently wait in the pickup zone.

·         And once everyone at home has settled down for the night, you see this time as ideal for catching up on emails or completing tasks you need to get done for work

If you are at the opposite end of the spectrum, you are a Separator. You need to maintain clear separation between your work and personal lives:

·         When at work you focus on work, and when you get home it’s time to deal with family and personal matters.  No bouncing between the two.  Personal time is devoted to relationships, family needs and personal hobbies or recreational activities.

·         You may have a work phone and a personal phone, just to help keep the two separate.

·         You may also keep two separate calendars. When you leave work you set the out-of-office.

Lastly, there are the Cyclers who for a period of time, to accomplish a major task or get through a busy time of the year, will work as Integrators, but then reach a point where they need to turn it off and keep work and home separate.

It is important to understand your own boundary-management style because it can be personally satisfying to you only to the degree that you feel you are in control of your boundaries. For example, what if you are a Separator at heart but find yourself in a work culture that forces you to function more as an Integrator? In a worst-case scenario you may have to change jobs; but hopefully you can find small ways to separate your home life from your work life, like turning on the out-of-office message on your email for certain periods of time while at home. On the other hand, if you are an Integrator but find yourself working in a culture that tolerates or even encourages Separators, you may need to reach understandings with them about their boundaries and when you may, or may not, cross over them.

The above examples illustrate why it is important not just to understand your own boundary management style but also the styles of your colleagues and the boundary management culture of your organization. Success in the workplace today is still about teamwork, and the tools we have at our disposal to manage our boundaries have to be used in the service of teamwork.

Source: The Wall Street Journal 3/29/16