It Takes Three: Relational Boundary Work, Resilience, and Commitment Among Navy Couples

Although scholars generally focus on how individuals manage their work and home demands, employees, outsiders and organizations co-construct work/non-work boundaries. Using interviews with couples from the U.S. Navy, an organizational context that encourages a mix of segmentation and integration behaviors, we develop the construct of relational boundary work to describe the joint behaviors of multiple parties in a relational system. Drawing on family systems theory, we delineate two dimensions describing how couples promote togetherness or separateness (cohesion) and how couples balance stability and change in the enactment of joint roles (adjustability). We develop theory that links relational boundary work to couples’ resilience (the ability to adapt to adverse circumstances), as well as their level of organizational commitment. We find that extreme adjustability (very high or very low) is problematic for couple resilience and extreme cohesion (very high or very low) can undermine organizational commitm...