Hiding in Plain Sight: Co-Enacting the Sustainable Worker Schema in a Consulting Firm

Emily D. Heaphy () and Špela Trefalt ()
Additional contact information
Emily D. Heaphy: Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003
Špela Trefalt: School of Business, Simmons University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

Organization Science, 2024, vol. 35, issue 4, 1271-1298

Abstract: This inductive study of 44 consultants in a prominent consulting firm examines how consultants set work-life boundaries without getting stigmatized and how they develop their workplace relationships into sources of help for this process. Within this organization, dominated by the ideal worker norm, we found a hidden, self-sustaining network of consultants who delivered excellent work while violating the ideal worker norm without stigmatization. Their way of working was based on a coherent set of beliefs about work and the work-life interface we named the sustainable worker schema , which contrasted with the ideal worker schema in all ways except in the ultimate goals: high performance and excellent work. Essential to this way of working was not only effective management of boundaries between work and life outside of work ( work-life boundaries ) but also effective management of boundaries around each work task or project ( work boundaries ). Consultants who embraced the sustainable worker schema worked fewer hours and achieved higher satisfaction with work-life balance than their counterparts. Together, these findings highlight the importance of embracing the centrality of work in work-life research; underscore the power of invisibility when challenging the ideal worker norm; and paint a rich picture of boundary work as a network-level phenomenon.

Keywords: work relationship development; ideal worker schema; sustainable worker schema; hidden social networks; work-life boundaries; work boundaries; boundary management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.14201 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:35:y:2024:i:4:p:1271-1298

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().