Administrative Science Quarterly

From a qualitative study of flight attendants volunteering as support providers in a peer-based employee assistance program, a typology of the boundary management tactics used by peer-support providers to maintain a comfortable distance from help recipients is derived and a grounded theory explaining providers' selection of tactics is proposed. After identifying 2 factors associated with tactic selection (personal experience and social structure), it is demonstrated that support providers' cognitive orientations, or logics of action, mediate the relationship between these factors and tactic selection. There are 4 types of support providers' logics of action identified and it is shown how a provider's logic may predict his or her preference for a particular boundary management tactic.