Work‐home conflict as a possible downside of flexibility I‐deals for whom? Opening the black box of men's and women's boundary‐management responses to work‐related availability pressures from supervisors and colleagues

Abstract Integrating insights from boundary management, self‐determination, and gender‐role literatures, this study aimed to contribute to (flexibility) i‐deals literature by unravelling the relationship between after‐hours work‐related availability pressures and men and women's work‐home conflict, meanwhile examining the mediating roles of boundary control and/or enacted work–non‐work segmentation (vs. integration) to indicate controlled‐ and/or autonomously motivated boundary‐management behaviours. We cross‐validated our four‐dimensional availability instrument (supervisors' and colleagues' availability norms and behaviours) (Study 1) and employed PLS‐SEM to test gender differences in three hypothesized availability pressures/conflict pathways, analysing data from 163 knowledge workers in ‘flexible i‐deals contexts’ (Study 2). Partial measurement invariance revealed that gender sub‐samples had to be analysed separately. Supervisors' availability norms had a direct positive relationship with women's work‐home conflict, indicating induced strain to spill over into the home. Whereas no support was found for controlled‐motivated integration (‘boundary incongruence’) impacting the genders' work‐home conflict, support was found for autonomously motivated integration (‘volition’) impacting men's work‐home conflict. In addition, boundary control was confirmed to be an important factor potentially enhancing both genders' work–non‐work segmentation. Findings are discussed in the light of our theoretical lens, emphasizing the importance of gender as a socioeconomic background factor in i‐deals studies to grasp complexities and genderedness of work‐life dynamics.