This led to the development of three models of the relationship between the two.
Some people’s preferred leisure activities were almost identical to their work activity: cooks spent all their time in the kitchen at home, mechanics tinkered with their cars all weekend, pilots flew small planes for pleasure.
Others did the precise opposite: security guards became parachutists, physical education teachers became weekend couch potatoes.
It seems as if one never got enough of the activity, while the other would not just want to stop it but actually do the opposite.
Three quite different ways of being
1. Spillover: This refers to the easy transfer of attitudes, feelings and behaviours from one domain (the workplace) to the other (the home, the playing field). It is not difficult to see how this may work.
Success at work has its financial rewards and job satisfaction, which can buy a better quality material lifestyle, which can increase personal satisfaction.
The idea is that people choose their work and leisure in ways that are contingent with their skills, personality and attitudes. People who are neat at home are neat at work, people who like to control at home like to control at work.
We choose, change and modify both our jobs and our spare time in line with our preferences and predictions. In a sense, we create both in terms of our needs, hopes and wants.
The spillover hypothesis suggests that work does not fully satisfy our needs so we continue them in our leisure. We choose jobs that demand we take risks and we have hobbies that are clearly about risks, which may be physical or financial.
Or, it maybe we choose highly intellectually analytical jobs and play games like bridge and chess, which are much the same. Somehow the work does not fully satisfy the need.
2. Compensation: This represents efforts to offset dissatisfaction and frustration in one domain by seeking satisfaction in the other. It is usually achieved by decreasing commitment and involvement in one domain while increasing it in the other.
Where your treasure is, there your heart is also, often where you genuinely choose to spend more time.
Compensation leads to psychological absorption and diverted attention. We all know the workaholic who finds it better being at work than at home.
For the person seeming reluctant to go home it may be quite simply that at work they are admired and supported, given private space and time and the company of peers.
At home on the other hand they have much less personal time, feel they need to be the supporter not the supported and miss the company of adults.
