Abstract
Although work-life balance (WLB) support in China's commercial banking sector is increasingly adopted, the forms of tension that employees experience in practice remain underexplored. Based on the preliminary analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews out of 54 interviews with front-line employees in Chinese commercial banks between September 2025 and February 2026, this developmental paper identifies three patterns through which the tension between work and life is experienced and processed: felt conflict, normalisation, and impaired wellbeing. Drawing on Labour Process Theory and the Institutional Logics Perspective, the findings suggest that organisational control mechanisms and competing institutional logics (state, market, and familial) shape how tension is experienced. The paper has the potential to contribute to WLB research by demonstrating that tension is a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon whose forms are shaped by the specific institutional and cultural context, such as the Chinese banking sector.