Constant connectivity and boundary management behaviors: the role of human agency

Abstract

The surge of remote and hybrid work in the post-pandemic era has reinforced the blurred boundaries between work and nonwork responsibilities. Thus, how people manage the boundaries between work and nonwork domains has become more complicated. This study advances the work of previous studies on constant connectivity by focusing on how employees’ perception of constant connectivity might actualize their boundary management behaviors. By adopting affordances for practice perspective, our study focused on contextual factors, including IT/internet policies, informal social norms, and work flexibility, to investigate how these factors could influence employees’ perception of constant connectivity. This paper reports a two-phase study. In the first phase, we used sentiment analysis to rank 38 internet use policies of Australian universities, grading their strictness toward ICT/internet use. Next, building on the first phase, we interviewed 28 academics. We identified three perceptions of constant connectivity related to participants’ practices, including constant connectivity as a resource for practice, a challenge for practice, and duality for practice. We also found five distinct boundary management behaviors connected to three different perceptions.