The Professional, the Personal, and the Ideal Worker: Pressures and Objectives Shaping the Boundary between Life Domains
综述了现代组织鼓励工作与个人生活融合的实践与美国职业规范强调分割的矛盾，指出分割有助于管理角色责任，融合则利于塑造职场身份和关系，两者共同服务于“理想员工”的工作优先要求。
Both scholarly literature and popular accounts suggest that modern organizational practices have moved toward encouraging employees to “integrate” or blur the boundary between their personal and professional domains, for example, through self-disclosure at work, company-sponsored social activities or providing on-site child care. Concurrently, an ideology underlying U.S. professional norms discourages integration practices such as referencing non-work roles during workplace interactions, expressing emotions in the workplace, and/or displaying non-work-related items in workspaces. In this review, we posit that these two norms firmly coexist because they differentially serve two objectives corresponding to the parallel bodies of research we examine: one addressing boundary management as a tool for handling role responsibilities, and the other considering boundary management as a tool for shaping workplace identity and relationships. Specifically, we posit that segmenting personal and professional domains facilitates the management of role responsibilities, whereas integration is more beneficial for managing workplace identity and relationships. Furthermore, both objectives serve the “ideal worker” imperative of work primacy. We identify key contingencies that help us to further understand existing research findings, and prompt future research directions informing theories for understanding the attractiveness and efficacy of different personal–professional boundary management strategies for both organizations and individuals.