The Work: Home Interface

Abstract

Our consideration of stress so far has looked inward at the manager’s working life within the organisation. Taking a broader view of the individual we shall now turn to those potential stressors which act at the interface between his two main life areas — work and home. In the first half of the chapter we shall be dealing with ‘the average manager’ — a man (as yet few women have reached senior levels; in 1973 an estimated 3000, or 0.75%, of Britain’s 400,000 executives were women), married to a wife who is principally home-oriented (the full dual-career marriage is as yet a deviant pattern), having approximately two children and finding little time for activities outside his work and home lives (Marshall and Cooper, 1976a). Later we shall look more closely at differences within the group.