The online language of work-personal conflict

Abstract With the blurring of boundaries in this digital age, there is increasing concern around work-personal conflict. Assessing and tracking work-personal conflict is critical as it not only affects individual workers but is also a vital measure among broader well-being and economic indices. This...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gloria Liou, Juhi Mittal, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Louis Tay, Lyle Ungar, Sharath Chandra Guntuku
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2023-11-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48193-3
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Summary:Abstract With the blurring of boundaries in this digital age, there is increasing concern around work-personal conflict. Assessing and tracking work-personal conflict is critical as it not only affects individual workers but is also a vital measure among broader well-being and economic indices. This inductive study examines the extent to which work-personal conflict corresponds to individuals’ language use on social media. We apply an open-vocabulary analysis to the posts of 2810 Facebook users who also completed a survey for an established work-personal conflict scale. It was found that the language-based model can predict personal-to-work conflict (r = 0.23) and work-to-personal conflict (r = 0.15) and provide important insights into such conflicts. Specifically, we found that high personal-to-work conflict was associated with netspeak and swearing, while low personal-to-work conflict was associated with language about work and positivity. We found that high work-to-personal conflict was associated with negative emotion and negative tone, while low work-to-personal conflict was associated with positive emotion and language about birthdays. 
ISSN:2045-2322