“The Right to Disconnect”:

Employees in Portugal have long had issues regarding conflicts and tensions between their work and personal spheres. Long working hours and work-related matters interfering with employees’ personal time have become normalized, increasing national reports of work/non-work conflicts. The precarious working and living conditions in Portugal make it especially difficult to reduce or mitigate conflicts and tensions between employees’ professional and personal domains. The current research aims to uncover which work-related factors could play a role in accentuating or diminishing work/non-work conflicts in order to establish how these factors may be adapted to promote a healthier working culture and environment which reduces work/non-work conflicts. The motives examined were centralization and ethical leadership. Job position and work arrangement were also introduced in the study as possible moderators between the examined motives and work/non-work conflicts. The chosen motives aim to represent a spectrum of different sources that could promote or impede autonomy which in turn might have mitigated or exacerbated conflicts between employees’ professional and personal spheres. As a result, the current investigation aims to answer the question: To what extent do organizational centralization and ethical leadership relate to work/non-work conflicts of Portuguese-based employees? Data gathering processes were done through an online survey that relied on the answers of 162 Portuguese-based employees. Findings revealed that centralization is a positive predictor of work/non-work conflicts, revealing that the higher the level of centralization of an organization, the more conflicts emerge between employees’ work and personal domains. No effect between ethical leadership and work/non-work conflicts was found. However, job position was found to moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and work/non-work conflicts - compared to operation-level employees, middle-level managers experienced higher levels of work/non-work conflicts when exposed to ethical leadership. Results revealed no effect for the remaining moderation analyses. This research both challenges and substantiates previous literature on work/life balance theory, organizational theory, and leadership theory. While recognizing the complex interplay between motives such as centralization, ethical leadership, job position, and work arrangement in regard to work/non-work, this study helps deepen the understanding of both work/non-work conflicts within the academic debate and work/non-work experiences in Portugal. It concludes that adopting a multi-level perspective that considers both individual and organizational contextual factors is key when analyzing work/non-work conflicts as these are extremely multifaceted.