ABSTRACT

Career Management and Stress

Career Management and Stress

Overview and Summary

When reading academic publications (specialized journals and book chapters) related to this topic, different terms arise. Some of them, like work-home interference or workhome conflict, offer a negative connotation. On the other hand, the term work-home balance entails a positive connotation. Finally, some neutral terms appear, as work-home interface, “common land,” or work-home interaction (WHI). Coming from the statistics field, this last WHI refers to the fact that work and home are not seen as competitive scopes, in which both demands either are in conflict or are in a complex balance, but as factors that combined will provide something greater and different than would have been predicted from either one alone. Therefore, HRM should help employees to live this WHI as a potentially positive experience, becoming the WHI into a “win-win” situation.

This WHI term also has its retractors; it can be considered somewhat restrictive as it divides employees' lives between only work and home (or more concretely, family), forgetting other important aspects of individuals' lives, such as leisure. This is the reason why some authors actually use the term work-home and not home. However, because of its popularity and tradition in the specialized literature and also to easy the reading, the term used in this chapter will be from now on always WHI, understanding “home” in a broader sense—that is, as this “nonwork” scope. On the other side, we are aware of the difficulty of separating both scopes (work and nonwork/family/home) at times because of irreversible changes in the labor context that, for example, place the employees' work beyond the established schedule, or because members carry out personal activities in working hours (e.g., personal telephone calls or e-mails).

Main Arguments

Going through the WHI consequences, it can be said that traditionally they have been studied in a negative sense, which is studying the physical-psychosomatic, psychosocial, and behavioral consequences that the WHI might mainly have on health (or more concretely, disease).

The consequences of a negative WHI are mainly the same physical or psychosomatic consequences that any kind of stress may have, that is, stomachache, headache and backache, annoyances, fatigue, dizziness, and pain in the chest or heart areas. In the long term, longitudinal studies have proven that the negative impact of work toward home (W/H) scope happens during a shorter time period (e.g., with dream deprivation), whereas the conflict from the home toward work (H/W) domain produces more damage to health in the long term.

With regard to psychosocial consequences, it has been explored how specific work domain factors affect the marital quality or satisfaction and how some home domain factors might influence work aspects such as work commitment, job satisfaction, or work stress. However, the predominant subject of study has been stress derived from making work and home demands compatible. As previously mentioned, we can therefore state that stress reactions will mainly appear in the couples with the so-called acrobats relationship.

There is evidence that both types of contagion ...