King's Business School Seminar Series - Prof. Ellen Ernst Kossek

Detailed summary

Prof. Ellen Ernst Kossek: Work-life Boundaries, Flexibility & Equality in the Hybrid Age

Are you juggling work emails at the dinner table, or finding it hard to switch off when working from home, especially if your boss or co-workers contact you during nonwork time? Or when you are working, do you receive texts from family members or friends and find it difficult to focus? You're not alone. Dr Ellen Kossek's research examines challenges in how we manage relationships between work and personal lives in the hybrid era. In her talk, Dr Kossek will explain the different ways people handle these challenges, which she calls “work-life boundary management styles,” and also “flexstyles.” How we manage the blurring of the work-nonwork interface matters for well-being, job quality experiences, and sustainable careers. Organizations, and occupational cultures also play a key role in the degree of choice individuals have in being able to access flexible working—a form of boundary management—to control where, when, and how connected we work. It’s important that everyone regardless of their job, background, or personal circumstances has a fair chance to work in a way that suits them, while advancing in a career. The talk will share real examples from various workplaces, including business, universities, retail, and nursing homes, showing how both employees and managers can better handle these work-life challenges. It's particularly relevant now, as organisations and staff are still figuring out the best ways to work together in this post-pandemic world.

If you would like to self- assess your own work-life boundary management style before the lecture, a tool is available for university educational use at: https://purdue.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_38n9h7OgvNdDeRf

Speaker biography

Ellen Ernst Kossek is an internationally renowned scholar who has received awards for conducting research to help create and advance the field of work and family, as one of its most generative scholars, and for fostering understanding of gender and diversity in organizations. She is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Kossek holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. She served as the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, and Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology. In 2024, she was recognized by Stanford/Elsevier Top Scientists List of the world’s best scientists. Kossek has also won awards for teaching and service including mentoring other scholars. She has also done significant public service, most recently for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on how to support family caregivers in STEM. A recent Harvard Business Review article on the future of flexibility was selected as a “must read” for 2023.

Dr Kossek is the author of multiple books including CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age (Wharton School Publishing, 2007) and Creating Gender Inclusive Organizations: Lessons from Research and Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2020). She is currently writing a book on “Democratizing Flexibility,” with Dr. Brenda Lautsch and is the lead editor of a special issue of Organization Science on “Remote and Hybrid Work: Transforming People and Organizations in a New Era”. Prior to becoming a professor, she worked on human resource issues for major corporations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.