Self-employed individuals constitute a large and growing segment of the U.S. workforce, but they have been virtually ignored by organizational researchers. In this study, it was hypothesized that self-employed individuals, because of greater physical, emotional, and financial investment in their jobs, would report higher levels of organizational commitment, job involvement, and work salience than would individuals employed by organizations. It was also hypothesized that there would be a stronger relationship between job, life, family, and self-satisfaction for self-employed individuals. LISREL, MANCOVA, ANCOVA, and planned comparisons were used to analyze the data from a sample of 62 self- and 115 organizationally employed male college graduates; the first hypothesis received partial support and the second hypothesis was fully supported. Implications and directions for future research are briefly discussed. Writing more than 60 years ago, Williams (1925, p. 3) noted the unity of life and labor—the complete impossibility of walling off the factory from the home. . . of dividing the hankerings of a man's working hours off from those of his hours of leisure. To be sure, the permeability of life's domains has received considerable attention since then. Wilensky (1960) provided vivid illustrations of how work and nonwork aspects of life are intertwined; subsequently, more systematic investigations have been conducted (e.g., Lounsbury & Hoopes, 1986; Near, Rice, & Hunt, 1978; Schmitt & Bedeian, 1982; Steiner & Truxillo, 1989).
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Thompson et al. (1992) studied this question.