Emotional Intelligence and Polychronicity in Achieving Work–Life Balance among Frontline Bank Employees: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

The conceptual paper studies the role of emotional intelligence and polychronicity in the context of work-life balance in the digitally intensive frontline bank employees working in the digitally intensive service environment. Frontline banking jobs also entail long-term contact with customers, high compliance, sales quotas, and switching tasks and between physical and online stores. The demands exacerbate time and strain based interference of work and non-work roles. This paper builds on the theory of Conservation of Resources and the Job Demands-Resources model in that it places emotional intelligence as a personal resource that facilitates emotion regulation, recovery, and boundary management and polychronicity as a time-use preference that may positively predict adaptive task-switching or increase overload with poor person-job fit. The framework incorporates four dimensions of emotional intelligence such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management as the direct antecedents of work life balance whilst polychronicity serves as a contingent factor which either enhances or deteriorates the relationships between them in multitasking-intensive work design. The article presents voidable hypotheses and as well as a comprehensive model to inform subsequent empirical confirmation in the banking conditions.