Equally the leisure activity may be a warm, caring, comfortable environment, while the workplace is cold, competitive, and stressful. Often, but by no means exclusively, men compensate at work and women at home.
The compensator might choose hobbies that give recognition and prizes that they cannot or do not receive at work. Or they may choose something like jogging, which is solitary and physical to compensate for their highly cerebral work in a busy social office. In this sense, the work does not fulfil certain needs enough.
3. Segmentation: This refers to the separation of work and leisure such that experience in the two domains do not have an influence on one another. This may be seen as a natural diversion or a futile attempt to erect an unnatural boundary.
Segmentation occurs when people are totally focused on the place/domain they are currently in. Equally, people may adopt different personas and coping styles in different places.
So people may have problem-focused strategies at work but emotional coping strategies while at leisure. They are different people in each environment, not necessarily opposites, just different.
Just as the actor in repertory can, and has to be, quite different characters week after week, so the segmenter is a compartmentaliser. They rarely worry about balance as they see the two things as unrelated to one another.
Interestingly, years ago I examined the recreational confessions of people in Who’s Who by looking at one entry every tenth page. The clear answer to emerge was gardening was the most commonly recorded hobby.
I took it as (sort of) evidence for the compensation theory for these high-profile people. Gardening is usually solitary, physical and creative all of which they had little of in their packed social and cognitive world.
Gardeners literally see the fruits of their labour in a task over which they have quite a lot of control. Often quite unlike the office.
What does all this mean?
So, what to conclude? Leisure pursuits can give a clue to an individual’s deeper needs and talents. You need certain abilities to play competitive, cognitive (chess/bridge) or physical (tennis/golf) activities.
You may also need a degree of conscientious practice to attain and maintain a level of performance. You may need quite a lot of money for the equipment.
But just like the financial world, luck may play a big part, not in how dedicated a person is, but how successful he or she is at their chosen activity.
Just as in all aspects of the person, leisure activities give clues when they are pursued with great dedication and passion, or associated with outstanding success.
* Yan Lu, Sandra Mortal, Sugata Ray (2020) "Hedge Fund Hold 'em" Journal of Financial Markets
