Coping with interferences between work and personal life: Practical considerations
Vincenzo Poerio
This article focuses on one particular kind of work-related stress: the experience of conflict or
interference between demands at work and responsibilities and commitments outside of the work
setting, especially with regard to one’s family and personal life. Referred to as «work-family conflict»
or (more recently) «work-life balance», this stressor has been demonstrated in research since the
1990s to exert a considerable impact on individuals’ well-being, along with other areas such as family
functioning and even on the job performance. In contrast to the intra-role conflict, which refers to
interference between roles within a single domain (e.g. the work context), the work-family (or worklife)
conflict is a form of inter-role interference, which occurs when there is conflict across domains.
In the 1980s and 1990s, research and specialist literature in this area focused predominantly on work
versus family, but in recent years the «non-work» component has been expanded to include other
aspects of people’s lives. For simplicity, we will refer to the two major spheres as the «work domain»
(i.e. a person’s paid employment) and the «life domain» (which comprises all other aspects of life,
including family, recreation, social activities and personal life). Although this classification is not
entirely appropriate, as clearly «life» includes work, it is commonly used in specialist literature and
enables differentiation between the two spheres.
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