South African managers self-regulating their after-hours smartphone usage: a revised perspective of work-family border theory

In a prior quantitative study, we found that South African managers could be categorised into three different border-keeper groups to integrate or segment their work and home domains when receiving after-hours communications through their smartphone from work. In this study we investigated how these three groups of border-expanders, border-adapters, and border-enforcers regulated their after-hours smartphone usage for work purposes in the home environment. We employed a reflexive thematic analysis of 27 in-depth interviews (20 smartphone users and 7 of their partners). This work updates Clark’s Work-Family border theory to include border concepts in the context of smartphone technology. The border-keeper groups were found to differ in how they used the physical, psychological, and temporal planes to integrate and/or segment their work and home domains. Moreover, this was also attributed to the way in which each group determines the importance and/or urgency of each communication and therefore the development of self-regulatory patterns in how they operationalise the facilitation of after-hours work communications.