Abstract
The continued rise of digitalization allows employees to be highly flexible regarding when and where to work, both inside and outside the traditional office, a trend captured in the term new ways of working (NWW). With NWW, increased employee flexibility changes the relationship between supervisor and employees, thereby posing both benefits and new challenges for leadership. For supervisors, NWW particularly complicate the nevertheless necessary task of exercising control over employees. In NWW supervisors often rely on electronic performance monitoring techniques as an alternative to traditional forms of supervisory control. Yet, since employees often perceive electronic monitoring as a signal of their supervisors’ distrust, these new monitoring systems can harm the employee–supervisor relationship. At the same time, by accepting the control and monitoring behavior of their supervisors, employees can form high-quality relationships with supervisors, which can in turn translate into greater productivity and mutual trust. By more closely tracing this process, the present chapter investigates how supervisors in NWW can effectively supervise employees by maintaining control while still expressing trust.
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1 Introduction
During the past two decades, innovations in information and communication technology have severely altered and impacted working life. Today’s organizations rely heavily on electronic communication technologies—for example, email, videoconferencing, and mobile devices—to enable more flexible work designs, thereby allowing employees to perform tasks independent of time and place while staying in touch with colleagues and supervisors. Such flexible work designs, which provide employees the autonomy to decide when and where to work, both outside and inside the office, all while connected via information and communication technology, can be encapsulated in the term new ways of working (NWW; Demerouti et al. 2014). In essence, any type of teleworking or activity-based flexible office exemplifies NWW (Appel-Meulenbroek et al. 2011; Demerouti et al. 2014). In a recent survey by the German Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO), the majority of office workers polled reported working autonomously, and about every fifth office worker indicated having no fixed workstation (i.e., no permanent assigned place for each individual) which has emerged as a central feature of activity-based flexible offices (Bauer 2014). By extension, more than half of the office workers surveyed claimed that they perceived temporal flexibility in their workplaces—that is, employees’ capacity to decide when to work—while more than 80 % reported having individual autonomy in choosing how to pursue occupational goals and more than 40 % claimed having spatial autonomy, or the capacity to choose where to work.
For employees, NWW are thus clearly associated with a range of advantages, including increased autonomy. More autonomy can increase employees’ job satisfaction (e.g., Baltes et al. 1999) and engagement in their work (e.g., Brummelhuis et al. 2012), as well as diminish work–family conflict (e.g., Byron 2005). Yet, NWW also pose new challenges for leadership. Giving employees autonomy to choose where and when they work impedes supervisors’ exercise of control, traditionally viewed to be a core dimension of leadership (Fayol 1930; Scott 1987; Sitkin et al. 2010). Since supervisors depend on high-performing employees in order to ensure organizational success, exercising effective control over employees remains especially crucial in NWW. To maintain control despite spatial and temporal distance, supervisors in NWW primarily have to rely on electronic performance monitoring (EPM) techniques. However, employees may often perceive EPM as a sign of their supervisors’ distrust (Stanton 2000a) and thus seek ways to evade such forms of control, which can in turn lessen their supervisors’ trust in them. In time, a vicious circle of declining trust and increased reliance on EPM could therefore result. Yet, since trust is a prerequisite for the exchange of knowledge and ideas (Golden and Raghuram 2010; Levin and Cross 2004), its absence in knowledge-intensive settings such as NWW significantly threatens work performance. The question therefore becomes how supervisors can effectively monitor employees in ways that allow them to maintain control over employees without sacrificing their trust.
In response, in this chapter we begin by explaining the concept of NWW and focusing on activity-based flexible offices as one of its most important manifestations. We next discuss factors that drive the implementation of NWW by outlining the associated benefits of NWW for both organizations and employees. We then turn to address a major challenge in NWW—namely, the design and execution of effective methods of control that can at once cultivate mutual trust between supervisors and employees. After detailing factors that can enhance employees’ acceptance of EPM as a primary manifestation of control in NWW, we conclude by offering implications for trust-enhancing leadership in NWW.
2 New Ways of Working
Introduced by Baarne et al. (2010), the concept of NWW describes the efforts of organizations to remodel overly rigid work designs into more flexible ones (cf. Brummelhuis et al. 2012). NWW exhibit three general characteristics. First, they lack the fixed time schedules typical of traditional work designs involving 9–to–5 jobs. In NWW, employees are free to decide for themselves when they will work. Second, employees in NWW have more autonomy in deciding where to work, and in response, organizations have begun to abandon fixed, individually assigned workstations to instead allow employees to flexibly choose a workstation from several functional work areas, a practice also known as desk-sharing or hot-desking (e.g., Hirst 2011; Kelliher and Anderson 2008). These functional work areas are designed to promote different kinds of work activities, which at base either require concentration or require communication. Examples of functional work zones that support concentration are so-called silent zones, in which oral communication among employees is prohibited (De Been and Beijer 2014). Office types that provide both desk-sharing and functional work areas have been referred to as activity-based flexible offices (Appel-Meulenbroek et al. 2011; Bodin Danielsson and Bodin 2008; Bodin Danielsson et al. 2014) and non-territorial offices (Elsbach 2003). As part of employees’ increased spatial autonomy, NWW also offer employees the possibility of working outside the main office building—for example, at home or while commuting (e.g., on trains). Third, in NWW, information and communication technologies facilitate employees’ temporal and spatial flexibility. Employees can thereby collaborate while working in different places or even at different times, largely by relying on information and communication media such as email, mobile devices, and videoconferencing tools, which allow access to work systems and servers from all workstations within and outside the office. As a result, with NWW employees no longer need to go to the office for certain periods or to complete certain tasks, which has generally increased collaboration across scattered locations in today’s organizations. In fact, the Global Workforce Study 2012 revealed that 47 % of employees worldwide use teleworking arrangements to at least some extent (Towers Watson 2012).
3 Drivers of New Ways of Working
Three major drivers for the increasing reliance on NWW can be identified. First, changes in the nature of office work impose new demands upon office design. Second, organizations seek to reduce costs through the more effective use of office space. Third, the changed work values of tomorrow’s workforce (e.g., Ryan and Kossek 2008) account for the shift toward NWW.
Regarding the first driver, a vast increase in knowledge work has occurred during the last two decades. Knowledge work is characterized by the knowledge worker’s need to concentrate on tasks while simultaneously sharing information with other organizational members (Davenport 2013). As a result, the transformation has created new requirements for office design. For one, when tasks require a high level of concentration instead of exchange and communication among colleagues, employees need enclosed office spaces that minimize distraction and disruption by colleagues. By contrast, if tasks require employees to share knowledge and ideas with each other, then enclosed office spaces hinder the flow of communication (Allen and Gerstberger 1973; Bouttelier et al. 2008; Davis 1984). To support knowledge work, work designs should facilitate concentrated work as well as interaction and communication among employees (Hua et al. 2011). Traditional office designs with fixed, individually assigned workstations—for instance, cellular officesFootnote 1 and open-plan officesFootnote 2—can only support one of these demands: either concentration without distraction or interactive communication (e.g., Oldham and Brass 1979; Sundstrom et al. 1980; Zahn 1991). These office designs are therefore less suited to the requirements of contemporary knowledge work. To address this challenge, NWW such as in activity-based flexible offices give employees the freedom to choose work environments that fit their current work activities best, either at home or within the office environment (Bodin Danielsson et al. 2014).
Regarding the second driver of NWW, the desk-sharing principle is a way for organizations to offer fewer workstations than the number of current employees. Activity-based flexible offices are usually dimensioned for less than 70 % of the workforce (Bodin Danielsson and Bodin 2008), which reflects the fact that workstations often go unused due to employees’ working on client premises or being on vacation or sick leave. By adjusting their office designs accordingly, organizations can cut the costs of office space and operations (Rennecker and Godwin 2005; van der Voordt 2004).
The third driver of NWW is a shift in work values. The ideals underlying NWW—namely, spatial and temporal autonomy for employees—are consistent with the work values of Generation X (born between 1962 and 1979) and Generation Y (born after 1980)Footnote 3. Whereas previous generations such as the Baby Boomers (born 1946–1961) valued status and extrinsic rewards as recognition of their loyalty and commitment (Collins 1998), Generation X more strongly values independence and autonomy (Jurkiewicz 2000). Moreover, members of Generation X prefer organizations that emphasize skill development, productivity, and work-life balance instead of status and tenure (Smola and Sutton 2002). Since Generation Y has experienced similar life events as Generation X, researchers have assumed similar work values for Generation Y—among them, work-life balance and career development (Zemke et al. 2000). As such, especially autonomy-related values such as work-life balance and discretion over working hours (Lyons 2004) are becoming increasingly important (Cennamo and Gardner 2008; Zemke et al. 2000). By offering work designs such as NWW that accommodate the preference for autonomy of younger generations, organizations can become more attractive to the current and upcoming workforces, which can better allow them to recruit promising talents and retain committed employees.
4 How New Ways of Working Impact Working Life
Besides benefits for organizations such as reduced costs for office space and improved adaptability to organizational turnover (e.g., Baarne et al. 2010; Rennecker and Godwin 2005), NWW can also be expected to improve employees’ work experiences, thereby resulting in a healthier and more satisfied, committed, and productive workforce. By offering temporal and spatial autonomy to employees, organizations allow their workers to schedule tasks in ways that suit their current needs, thereby saving both time and energy (Kelliher and Anderson 2008). Furthermore, in being allowed to work while commuting, employees can use time more efficiently, and can better balance work with family (e.g., Parasuraman and Greenhaus 2002). Early studies of how NWW impacts working life underlined these positive effects by demonstrating that NWW foster increased feelings of autonomy that are positively related to job satisfaction (e.g., Baltes et al. 1999), work engagement (e.g., ten Brummelhuis et al. 2012) and reduced levels of work–family conflict (e.g., Byron 2005).
However, despite these positive effects for employees and organizations, NWW also pose challenges for leadership. Giving employees the freedom to choose where and when to work impedes the exercise of traditional control usually seen as a core dimension of leadership (Fayol 1930; Scott 1987; Sitkin et al. 2010). In traditional work designs, in which employees have fixed, individually assigned workstations in close proximity to their colleagues and supervisors, supervisors can easily observe employees as they work. In NWW, by contrast, employees do not necessarily work in close proximity to their supervisors or have any fixed address in the office. This can make it difficult for supervisors to find employees, let alone monitor them. The spatial distance between supervisors and employees becomes even greater if the latter work remotely. In such cases, it can be challenging for supervisors to recognize whether employees at any given moment are in the office building or working remotely. In effect, NWW involve less face-to-face contact between supervisors and employees than in traditional work designs.
5 Effective Supervision in NWW
Given these changes that transform traditional workplaces into those involving NWW, the question arises how supervisors in NWW can ideally supervise employees. Since employees often work on complex tasks of great importance to the success of their organizations, their failure to achieve expected results or counterproductive work behavior can be costly. As such, effective supervision that maintains the supervisor’s control over the workflow is essential (Sitkin et al. 2010), though the reduced face-to-face interaction in NWW can render traditional in-person supervision impossible. In that regard, Bijlsma-Frankema and Koopman (2004) have referred to the “oxymoron” of control in today’s globalized and digitalized workplaces, namely that the need for trust between supervisors and employees has increased in spite of, as well as because of, the fact that supervisors can no longer observe their employees at every step. At the same time, new ways to exercise control can threaten the mutual trust between supervisors and employees. It is therefore essential to design control systems in NWW that can support the development of trust. In response, we turn to review some traditional control taxonomies to reveal which control modes appear most applicable in NWW, and discuss their potential effects on trust between supervisors and employees.
Theoretically, there are numerous ways in which supervisors in NWW can exercise control over employees. Broadly defined, control encompasses all processes by which supervisors direct attention, motivate, and encourage their subordinates to act in expected ways (Cardinal 2001). Control theory (Ouchi 1979) traditionally distinguishes behavior, output, and clan control. While behavior control refers to the measurement and evaluation of the work process, output control occurs with the measurement and evaluation of results, whereas clan control emerges in the attitudes, values, and beliefs shared among the workforce. Ouchi has argued that two variables in particular determine the selection of the appropriate control mechanism. If both the ability to measure outputs and the supervisor’s knowledge of the processes necessary to produce the output are high, then either output or behavior control is appropriate. Meanwhile, if the ability to measure outputs is high, but the knowledge of the so-called transformation process is low, then output control is optimal. Conversely, in the case of difficulties with measuring outputs despite sound knowledge of the transformation process, behavior control becomes mandatory. Lastly, if both measurability and knowledge of the transformation process are low, then organizations should focus on clan control. Kirsch (1996) investigated the modes of control that organizations actually use in practice and confirmed that outcome measurability significantly predicted outcome control, whereas the interaction between behavior observability and the controller’s knowledge of the transformation process significantly predicted behavior control. In her work on control choices, Eisenhardt (1985) built upon Ouchi’s (1979) research to argue that the level of uncertainty also influences decisions to prioritize output or behavior control. Rustagi et al. (2008) have confirmed that this circumstance also applies to actual organizational practice by showing that the level of uncertainty increases the use of formal controls. Additional antecedents of control decisions include the strategic importance of the task and its complexity, both of which increase reliance upon formal controls (Remus and Wiener 2012).
In NWW, though employees often perform tasks of great importance to the success of their organizations, the reliance upon virtual communication between supervisors and employees involves a great deal of uncertainty (Tangirala and Alge 2006). Though this circumstance seems to suggest that the use of formal controls will be considerable, Kirsch (1997) has noted that, in practice, supervisors implement a range of controls that consists of mixtures of formal (i.e., output and behavior) and informal (i.e., clan-based) modes. In that sense, the specific decision between output and behavior control depends upon the degree to which either the task or the task process can be measured and evaluated. Since NWW increase the distance between supervisors and employees and reduce their level of face-to-face interactions, supervisors must primarily rely upon EPM, which given the technological advancements in recent decades offer supervisors a variety of monitoring techniques. Sophisticated EPM systems can be used to evaluate the output of employees in NWW based on a host of performance indicators, while software that monitors employees’ keystrokes, emails, and time spent on websites, as well as location-sensing technologies, can be used to monitor employees’ behavior. In effect, today’s EPM systems thus encompass techniques for both output and behavior control, and accordingly, in the remainder of this chapter, the terms control and monitoring refer to both output and behavior control techniques. In investigating the predictors of electronic monitoring usage and secrecy, Alge et al. (2004) have demonstrated that supervisors, who depend strongly upon their employees and tend to expect the future performance of their employees to be low, rely heavily upon electronic monitoring. At the same time, supervisors with a low propensity to trust have a tendency to keep these monitoring efforts secret.
6 The Bright and Dark Sides of Electronic Performance Monitoring
Regarding the effects of output and behavior control, an empirical study (Oliver and Anderson 1994) of sales employees revealed that the respective modes of control have distinct effects upon employees’ levels of organizational commitment, their acceptance of authority and performance reviews, and their preference for risk. While behavior control noticeably increased organizational commitment and acceptance of authority, output control increased employees’ risk preference. Since the publication of these findings, numerous scholars have investigated how control and monitoring affects employees’ attributes and behaviors. Apparently, these studies have produced contradictory results: On the one hand, some studies have emphasized the negative effects of monitoring and control, for both the people exercising control and those subject to control. Regarding controllers, Strickland (1958) has shown that intensive face-to-face monitoring of outputs can diminish their trust towards the monitored employees. In particular, the level of trust supervisors held in consistently monitored employees tended to be less than that held in employees seldom monitored, while the level of prior monitoring was significantly and positively related to that of subsequent monitoring. These findings have suggested that monitoring can initiate a vicious circle consisting of declining levels of trust followed by even more intense monitoring. Later, Kruglanski (1970) replicated Strickland’s results to show that supervisors tend to perceive less-monitored employees to be more trustworthy than more frequently monitored ones. Similarly, McAllister (1995) found that managers’ use of control-based monitoring and defensive behavior could not be empirically distinguished from their level of negative cognition-based trust in their peers. In the context of virtual teams, Piccoli and Ives (2003) reached a comparable conclusion, as team members who exercised more behavior control demonstrated less trust in their team than team members who did not exercise such control. These authors argued that the exercise of control increased the vigilance of team members, who in response actively sought out and detected deviant behavior by other team members. This finding is in line with results reported by Dennis et al. (2012), who found that the use of behavior control drove supervisors to perceive the behavior of their employees in a way consistent with their predispositions. In general, it is important to bear in mind that the exercise of control and monitoring always poses added costs (Jensen and Meckling 1976), meaning that for supervisors and organizations alike, it is crucial to gauge whether the exercise of control is actually worth the information it could reveal.
In terms of how monitoring and control affect the people being controlled, numerous studies have underscored similarly negative consequences. Enzle and Anderson (1993) showed that electronic surveillance with video cameras combined with perceived distrust on the side of the person exercising this kind of control diminishes the intrinsic motivation of the people monitored. Later, in conceptualizing trust as the absence of harassment, monitoring, and surveillance, Cunningham and MacGregor (2000) indicated that such trust is significantly and positively related to job satisfaction after controlling for job design factors, yet negatively related to quitting and absence from work. In a recent study of similarly detrimental effects, Crowley (2012) found that supervisors’ use of coercive control erodes employees’ level of pride and effort via mechanisms of dehumanization and the facilitation of abuse.
On the other hand, empirical evidence also supports the positive effects of monitoring and control—again, for both people exercising control and people being controlled. Concerning controllers, McAllister (1995) identified a positive relationship between managers’ level of affect-based trust and the degree to which they exercise need-based monitoring—that is, keeping track of others’ personal and work-related needs. These results followed those of Komaki (1986), who demonstrated that performance monitoring in the form of work sampling was the critical difference between effective and ineffective managers in terms of their potential to motivate employees. In fact, effective managers invested considerably more time gathering performance information than their ineffective peers.
By the same token, regarding the employees being controlled, Bijlisma and van de Bunt (2003) found a strong, positive correlation between monitoring and employees’ level of trust in the monitoring supervisor. In their study, monitoring was operationalized as the supervisors’ awareness of whether their employees performed in line with their expectations. Notably, this effect remained significant even after controlling for related variables, including support, guidance, and openness.
7 Employee Perceptions of Monitoring Matters
To reconcile these diverse and apparently contradictory findings, distinguishing both personality-based and situation-based factors appears to be relevant. In terms of personal predispositions, Schoel et al. (2011) showed that employees with low, unstable levels of self-esteem exhibit a preference for autocratic supervisors who exercise a high level of control over them. On a similar note, Rietzschel et al. (2014) found that close monitoring significantly increased intrinsic motivation for employees with high need for structure, yet significantly decreased the job satisfaction of employees with low need for structure.
Stanton’s (2000a) framework can provide an overview of a range of potentially influential situation-based factors. Stanton has argued that certain monitoring characteristics influence the cognition of monitoring by the employee (e.g., perceived fairness of monitoring), which translates into immediate reactions (e.g., acceptance or rejection of monitoring) and long-term consequences (e.g., job satisfaction). Among these characteristics are the target of monitoring (i.e., who and what is monitored?), the frequency of monitoring (i.e., how often does monitoring occur?), the source of monitoring (i.e., who exercises monitoring?), the controllability of monitoring (i.e., to which degree can employees control onset and timing of monitoring?), and the consistency of monitoring. Recently, a growing body of research has offered support for the proposition that monitoring, when applied consistently across a group of employees, can deliver accurate information and give employees a feeling of control over monitoring processes, which enhances their perceived fairness of both electronic and traditional monitoring systems (Stanton 2000b). Also regarding control over the monitoring process, Stanton and Barnes-Farrell (1996) earlier found that the ability of employees to delay or prevent electronic monitoring enhances their feelings of personal control and, in turn, their task performance, whereas exact knowledge that monitoring occurred decreased these same feelings. A more recent study by McNall and Stanton (2011) underlined the importance of employees’ perceptions of control over the monitoring process by showing that, in the use of location-tracking devices, it is crucial to grant employees “protected spaces” where such monitoring is not exercised. Yet, the degree of perceived personal control over the monitoring process is similarly important in another regard, as Spitzmüller and Stanton (2006) have revealed. Their findings indicated that personal control moderated the relationships among organizational commitment, identification, and employees’ intentions to comply with or resist monitoring. In particular, employees with high levels of commitment to and identification with their organizations, coupled with a high degree of perceived control over the monitoring process, are most likely to comply with the monitoring process. At the same time, the use of information produced by monitoring is essential for predicting employees’ attitudes toward electronic monitoring (Stanton and Weiss 2000); for example, if employees perceive that such information will be used for punitive instead of supportive purposes, they are more likely to resist monitoring. In the same vein, McNall and Roch (2009) used a social exchange framework to show that employees’ perceptions of the purposes of electronic monitoring in terms of whether it supported their professional development or was used for coercion impacts their perceived level of interpersonal justice. These authors also showed that detailed explanations of the use of electronic monitoring actually enhance monitored employees’ perceptions of informational justice and that such interpersonal and informational justice can increase their trust in their supervisors, which ultimately translates into greater job satisfaction and performance. Altogether, this line of research suggests that how controlled employees perceive control is crucial when evaluating how control affects outcomes (Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa 2010).
In distinguishing the effects of EPM and traditional monitoring upon fairness, McNall and Roch (2007) revealed that computer monitoring is perceived to be the most procedurally just, whereas conventional face-to-face monitoring is deemed the most interpersonally just and least invasive of employees’ privacy. Stanton and Sarkar-Barney (2003) compared the effects of EPM and face-to-face monitoring and found that electronically monitored groups exhibited higher-quality performance than the traditionally monitored group.
To summarize what we have discussed so far, supervisors in NWW are particularly apt to rely on electronic monitoring techniques because NWW increase the distance between supervisors and their employees and decrease their face-to-face interaction. Supervisors who heavily depend on their employees and whose employees have demonstrated weak performance in the past can particularly be expected to rely heavily on electronic monitoring (Alge et al. 2004). At the same time, whether electronic monitoring focuses on employees’ output or their behavior depends on the respective measurability of processes versus results. Currently, a body of encouraging empirical results suggests positive effects of electronic monitoring, which if enacted properly, is acceptable to employees and can enhance their job-related attitudes and behavior at work. Electronic monitoring may even pose advantages over traditional face-to-face monitoring if it can deliver more accurate information on employees’ performance for use in the reward and evaluation processes and if it gives employees feelings of control over the EMP systems used. In effect, these characteristics enhance employees’ perceptions of monitoring transparency and fairness. However, if the design and execution of control is implemented poorly, then adverse consequences are likely to surface, and in particular, employees’ trust towards their supervisors may decline.
8 Practical Implications for Supervisors in NWW
Having concluded that NWW are characterized by the need for both effective control and mutual trust, we here highlight the practical implications of the above-discussed dynamics as advice for supervisors in NWW. A growing body of largely conceptual work (Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa 2005; Costa and Bijlsma-Frankema 2007) suggests that under specific circumstances, control and trust can complement and support each other. In that regard, it is essential that the control exercised by supervisors is accepted among employees. Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa (2010) have proposed four factors for determining the acceptance or rejection of any given control technique that readily accommodate the diverse empirical findings concerning drivers of monitoring acceptance summarized above. These authors first argue that to be perceived as legitimate and hence accepted, a control technique must be perceived by employees as a tool for enhancing their competence. This factor parallels McNall and Roch’s finding (2009) of the necessity for employees to perceive a developmental purpose in the use of electronic monitoring. For supervisors in NWW, this circumstance implies the need for supervisors using any form of electronic monitoring to give their employees timely, constructive feedback. Such practice can also demonstrate to them how their supervisors actually use electronic monitoring systems, which should in turn boost their acceptance of those systems (Stanton and Weiss 2000). Second, Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa (2010) suggest that employees should be involved in the design and execution of control systems, since such participation promises to increase their level of identification with and thus acceptance of these systems. Third, supervisors should grant their employees some level of autonomy despite the control systems’ being in place (Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa 2010). In response to this factor, supervisors should articulate to employees in which ways they exercise control over them, yet at once make clear the ways in which they do not. Notably, the second and third factors of Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa’s (2010) framework parallels all of the empirical findings highlighting the importance of employees’ perception of personal control over the systems used to monitor them (e.g., McNall and Stanton 2011; Spitzmüller and Stanton 2006). For supervisors in NWW, this implies that the use of electronic monitoring should be restricted to situations in which it is vital and abandoned in all others, a practice that supervisors should articulate to employees to make them aware of their autonomy. Ideally, supervisors should involve their employees when deciding upon which situations will be monitored and which will not. As their fourth and last factor, Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa (2010) have argued that control systems must also enhance employees’ perceptions of justice in order to be perceived as legitimate and thus accepted. This factor takes support from Stanton’s work (2000a, b), which highlighted the importance of monitoring consistency. For supervisors in NWW, this factor implies the need to use electronic monitoring systems in ways comparable both across employees and across time. Beyond that, they need to ensure that their employees are actually aware of such consistency.
9 Conclusion
In conclusion, NWW pose benefits for both organizations (e.g., reduced costs) and employees (e.g., improved work life balance) that justify NWW as a dominant trend in today’s workplaces and support their likely increase in the coming years. However, NWW also pose challenges for leadership in terms of how supervisors can maintain mutual trust with their employees yet still exercise effective control over them. In this chapter, we developed specific suggestions on how this issue can be addressed. In particular, we emphasized that employees’ subjective perceptions of monitoring and control systems matter, together with their perceived fairness and transparency. From this idea, we have outlined a clear agenda for supervisors in NWW toward ensuring widespread acceptance for control and monitoring systems. By working toward such acceptance, the benefits that NWW offer for organizations and employees alike can be more fully realized.
Notes
- 1.
Cellular offices are those with walls up to the ceiling and an office door.
- 2.
- 3.
We refer to the classification proposed by Lyons (2004).
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Romeike, P., Wohlers, C., Hertel, G., Schewe, G. (2016). New Ways of Working: Chances and Challenges for Trust-Enhancing Leadership. In: Blöbaum, B. (eds) Trust and Communication in a Digitized World. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28059-2_9
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