Segmentation or Integration? The Managerial Approach to Work-Family Balance in the Age of Virtual Team Work

Abstract: The virtual team work mode has become an inevitable trend for the organization work, resulting in a significant characteristic, “boundarylessness”, with a high overlap between the work and family domains. Such boundaryless trend changes the premise of previous research and practice that work and family can be distinguished. Responding to this problem, some scholars suggested to follow this boundaryless trend and promote work-family integration. However, the managerial practice based on this principle resulted in a series of negative effects. This raises an important research question needed to be resolved under the trend of virtual team work mode: is the traditional work-family differentiation principle or the current work-family integration principle more suitable to enhance work-family balance? Do we need other new perspective to resolve this problem? In order to resolve this important research question, this study relies on social identity theory to assist the insufficient explanatory logic of conservation of resources theory, discussing the mechanism of team virtuality on employees’ work-family integration behavior, as well as the managerial intervention principle to achieve work-family harmony. This study helps to build a new theoretical framework for the study of work-family balance to promote the theory development in the intelligent digital era, and suggests a new management perspective to achieve work-family harmony.