Setting and Pushing Boundaries: Implications for Work-Life Balance, Well-Being, and Performance.

This symposium brings together a diverse group of management scholars to provide critical and often surprising answers to the question of how people set and push boundaries at work around a broad range of issues, including declining requests, replying to off-hours emails, asking sensitive questions, asking for extensions on deadlines, and reacting to interruptions. People often struggle to set boundaries. When responding to requests, refusers overestimate the interpersonal costs of refusal, as Krithiga Sankaran, David Tannenbaum, and Craig Brimhall find in their empirical examination of refusals. Relatedly, employees who send off-hours emails are mostly unaware of the pressure their receivers feel to reply right away, as Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns' work demonstrates. Aside from struggling to set boundaries, people also grapple with pushing boundaries as Einav Hart and Eric VanEpps find when it comes to asking sensitive questions, and as Jaewon Yoon, Grant Donnelly, and Ashley Whillans show when asking for extensions on adjustable deadlines (particularly for women). Further, as demonstrated by Elana Feldman and David Greenway, people can have varied emotional reactions to interruptions depending on their temporal perceptions of those interruptions as well as the context within which interruptions unfold. The key takeaway of the symposium is that navigating boundaries involves at least two perspectives -- those who set/push the boundary and those who are affected by them -- and these perspectives do not always align. Consequently, people may impact one another's work-life balance, psychological well-being, and performance in unintended ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]