ABSTRACT Developments such as digitalization and remote work increasingly decentralize traditional work environments, shifting professional interaction from physical to virtual spaces. This shift may blur traditional boundaries between individuals' roles within and beyond the workplace and consequently heighten the influence of cues that signal individuals' boundary preferences in shaping professional decisions. In these evolving work settings, employees increasingly initiate and maintain professional connections through digital channels with limited available information. Drawing on boundary theory and a dual‐process model perspective, we investigate how individuals' management of role boundaries affects their decisions to initiate professional relationships in such information‐scarce contexts. Across five experimental studies, we assess how role management influences partner selection, considering varying levels of deliberative thinking and information availability. Our results reveal that role separation preferences affect business partner choice in both more and less deliberate decision‐making conditions. Notably, under higher levels of deliberative thinking, the impact of role separation preferences on judgment formation remains stable only for more experienced employees. These findings illuminate the relationship between personal roles and professional decisions, offering insights for organizations adapting to the increasingly hybrid and digitally mediated work landscape.
Feldner et al. (2026) studied this question.