In this chapter we discuss another behavior-based personal intervention, namely role balance. Role balance involves engaging in balanced activities— balanced between maintenance activities (those designed to maintain role functioning and meet basic needs) and flourishing activities (those designed to allow the individual to meet growth needs). Specifically, we describe some maintenance and flourishing activities that are essential to creating role balance in work life and nonwork domains (e.g., family life, health and safety, love life, financial life, social life, leisure life, and cultural life). We then discuss how instructors can implement the role balance principle in workshops designed to train employees how to increase work-life balance.

This chapter describes how people engage in new roles and activities to help achieve life balance and maintain acceptable levels of wellbeing. This is explained through the principle of diminishing satisfaction. The chapter covers many strategies that people use in various life domains: health, love, family, material, social, work, leisure, and culture.

This chapter focused on the notion that life balance can be achieved, at least partly, through engagement in social roles in work and nonwork domains. This is explained through the principle of satisfaction limits. Three strategies were described: (1) avoid putting all your egs in one basket, (2) contemplate the ideal life, and (3) assess how much time you spend in what role and reallocate time.

This chapter focuses on how people achieve life balance by actively engaging in social roles in multiple life domains such as health, love, family, material, social, work, leisure, and culture. The wellbeing effect is explained through the principle of satisfaction of the full spectrum of human developmental needs.

The international evaluation of Japan’s work practice has made an about-turn since the beginning of the twenty-first century, from role model to problem case. The general response has shifted from admiration to caution and from envy to skepticism. Once heralded as a model from which every country must learn, the nation’s business world now appears to be seen as a framework to be avoided. Yet, Japan remains the third largest economy in the world, even if its potentials and challenges are currently being overshadowed by the struggle for international hegemony between the two superpowers – the United States and China. This chapter illustrates the plurality in Japan's world of labor by first highlighting the continuation of the old patterns: the prevailing culture of small business and the perpetuation of the so-called Japanese-style management model. The second half of the chapter focuses on the emerging changes by examining the growing spread of a new form of capitalism, which one might call 'cultural capitalism', based on the knowledge industry and the production and consumption of symbols, images, and representations.