Student work-study boundary flexibility and relationships with burnout and study engagement

Relatively little is known about how working students manage their dual roles of work and study. To extend this research, we examined the direct and indirect relationships between boundary flexibility-ability (the appraised capacity to modify a boundary of one role to accommodate better the demands of another role) and boundary flexibility-willingness (the preparedness to do so) in both the work and study domains and outcomes of student burnout and study engagement in a sample of 851 working students (76% female; mean age 20.69 years). We tested the indirect paths via work-study conflict and facilitation. Both work and study flexibility-ability and flexibility-willingness, independently and in concert, were related to student burnout (46% variance explained) and study engagement (28% variance explained) as expected, and results supported work-study conflict and facilitation as underlying mechanisms in these relationships, with the indirect path via work-study conflict being more important than that via work-study facilitation. Thus, there are benefits for students when work and study boundaries are flexible and when students are willing to make use of this flexibility.