EVERYDAY SELF-REGULATION, RECOVERY, AND BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE AMONG CZECH MANAGERS: A QUALITATIVE DIARY-INFORMED INTERVIEW STUDY

Abstrakt

Managerial well-being has been studied predominantly through survey measures of burnout, strain, and engagement. Much less is known about how managers themselves organise everyday recovery, self-monitoring, and work-nonwork boundaries, especially when interview accounts are examined alongside behavioural traces of time use. To explore how three Czech private-sector managers described, justified, and organised everyday selfregulation and recovery, and to examine what became visible when those accounts were read alongside 14-day timeuse diary records. Small-sample qualitative study using diary-informed semi-structured interviews and descriptive time-use diaries. Data was analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. Three purposively selected managers – pseudonyms David, Aleš, and Petra – representing variation in sex, age, managerial scope, and industry sector within the Czech private sector. Three themes were developed. First, participants differed in how readily they treated self-regulation as a legitimate topic of attention when prompted to discuss it. Second, all three described some form of self-monitoring, but monitoring did not reliably translate into sustained reorganisation of daily practice. Third, the most durable boundaries were secured by structural anchors – a formal working arrangement or an external fixed schedule – rather than by moment-to-moment willpower. The most analytically productive moments arose where diary summaries complicated interview narratives, including Aleš’s claimed sense of balance despite diary evidence of long work hours and recurrent evening disturbance, and David’s coherent self-management account despite diary evidence that his functioning was materially supported by external schedule constraints and unequal domestic coverage. The study makes a bounded substantive contribution by showing that managerial self-regulation is not simply an individual competence, but a situated accomplishment shaped by time structures, role arrangements, and relational support. Its methodological contribution is demonstrative rather than confirmatory: diary-informed interviewing proved useful for surfacing tensions between narrated balance and organised daily life. The findings are analytically specific, not generalisable, and are offered as hypotheses for further research.