Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

PhD in Business

Department

Department of Management

First Advisor

Susan Adams

Second Advisor

Robert Galliers

Third Advisor

Douglas T. Hall

Abstract

Individuals make transitions between roles everyday as they move from home to work to other settings. This dissertation extends the work of Goffman (1959), Hall & Richer (1988), and Ashforth et al. (2000, 2001) on the topic of micro role transitions, which are the "frequent and usually recurring transitions, such as the commute between home and work" (Ashforth et al., 2000: 472). While the context of most of the research on micro role transitions has typically been focused on the work-home boundary (e.g. Rothbard et al., 2005; Nippert-Eng, 2008; Greenhaus & Powell, 2006; Hall & Richter, 1988), the three studies of this dissertation elaborate on the extant research by examining the inter-role transitions between two different occupational roles and the intra-role transitions between physical and virtual worlds. By changing the focus from the work-home context to these other boundaries, it was possible to create a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how individuals experience micro role transitions and the agency that individuals have when they switch from role to role. On a practical level, the findings are expected to be helpful to individuals who have multiple occupational roles, create appropriate boundaries around their occupational domains by systematically thinking about different variables that are related to the self, the structure of their domains, and the relationship between their multiple roles.

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