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Paradoxes of Control in Remote Work Arrangements

Conference Paper · January 2020

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Joao Vieira da Cunha Tommasina Pianese

IESEG School of Management Italian National Research Council
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 PARADOXES OF CONTROL IN REMOTE WORK ARRANGEMENTS

Joao Vieira da Cunha

IESEG School of Management
j.cunha@ieseg.fr

Tommasina Pianese
Italian National Research Council
Institute for Studies on Mediterranean (CNR ISmed)
tommasina.pianese@ismed.cnr.it

Luisa Errichiello
Italian National Research Council
Institute for Studies on Mediterranean (CNR ISmed)
luisa.errichiello@ismed.cnr.it

Research has shown that remote work arrangements (RWAs), such as telework, computer mediated

work and virtual teams lead to major changes in the control of work. However, the impact produced

by remote working on the intensity and dynamics of control is not straightforward. Existing studies

reveal two contradictory effects of RWAs on control. Some studies argue that RWAs increase control

over employees. Technologies that supports RWAs provide vast amounts of data about how work is

accomplished. Thus doing, they create a panoptical effect whereby the mere possibility of

surveillance is enough to ensure compliance. Other studies argue that RWAs decrease control over

employees. Technologies that support RWAs weaken direct supervision and peer pressure. The

physical distance afforded by IT hinders managers attempts to enforce compliance even when they

can monitor work in real time.

The vast amount of rich qualitative data and broad quantitative analyses in research on RWAs

should provide enough to address this tension. The problem, however, is that studies on each side

draw on different theoretical frameworks and rarely address the findings and arguments of the other

side. We review empirical research on RWAs and control to address this tension. Our goal is not to

adjudicate between these two effects, but instead to show the relationships between the dynamics of

control in remote work.

 Our analytical literature review suggests that the level of control in specific RWAs is specified

by the relationship between two tensions: the tension between connective and protective participation,

on the one side, and the tension between directive and delegative control, on the other side.

Research on RWAs has discussed the role of both directive and delegative leadership practices in

the control of telework and virtual team work.

Directive leadership practices are leadership practices where managers take upon themselves to

enforce control over employees. Delegative leadership practices allocate part of the burden of

controlling employees’ work to employees themselves.

There is a tension between directive and delegative control in remote work arrangements because

directive control practices need delegative control practices to work and vice-versa. However,

delegative control practices can hinder directive control practices and vice-versa. RWAs leave

managers without the resources that co-presence provides for directive control practices. It is

delegative control practices, such as strengthening organizational culture and relying on trust, which

allow managers to specify a set of work behaviors for employees to adopt. However, delegative

control mechanisms do not emerge and work on their own. Instead, delegative control practices

require managerial intervention which reduces the sense of autonomy which enforces such delegative

control practices. This, in turn, requires managers to leverage resources that improve their ability to

exert directive control, ie. by building their transformational leadership power, by tightening their

leadership ties with employees, and by tightening the bonds between employees and their company.

As managers do so, they reduce their ability to frame work in RWAs as an autonomous endeavor and

therefore weaken the effectiveness of trust and culture as control mechanisms. Employees come to

appropriate these arrangements as directive control to RWAs and resist managers’ attempts to do so.

Taken together, this dynamic tension between directive and delegative control shows that

managers cannot rely on IT to enforce prescribed work procedures on its own. Instead, remote work

arrangements require managers to enact everyday leadership practices that strike a changing balance

between both types of control processes. Our analytical literature review shows that rather than
finding a compromise, or choosing one or the other, managers can incorporate both sets of practices

and attempt to address the challenges of doing so as they surface. The tension between these two

types of leadership and their effect on control depends on the practices that managers use to navigate

through these tensions.

Research on RWAs has shown how employees can enact connective or protective practices

towards their organization. Connective practices make employees’ work visible to the organization

so as to increase their sense of belonging and to allow them to benefit from their relationship with

their managers. Protective practices make employees’ work invisible so as to increase their sense of

independence from the organization and to allow them to avoid direct supervision.

The tension between connective and protective practices comes from the cost of increased control

that employees must pay to benefit from visibility. Our analytical review highlights the benefits that

remote employees accrue from making themselves visible.

When employees make themselves visible to managers, they benefit from the impression

management opportunities that such relationship allows. However, when employees do make

themselves visible to their managers they are also providing data about their actions and achievements

over which they have less control and which therefore will compromise their ability to specify the

image that their managers form of them. When employees make themselves visible to their peers,

they benefit from the sense of belonging and affiliation that such closer interactions provide.

However, when employees do so they expose themselves to peer dynamics that impose upon specific

dimensions of their identity, reducing individual employees’ ability to enact an identity that is aligned

with their own intrinsic interpretations and motivations.

Our analytical literature review shows that the outcome of the tension between visibility and

invisibility is specified by employees’ adaptive choices to address situated conditions for action.

However, employees do not deal with this tension on their own because their managers may try to

take advantage of the control that identification affords. This means tha employees’ choices are also

shaped by managers’ attempts at appropriating identification processes for control.

 In sum, the critical review of literature reveals that level of control in each RWA depends on the

tension between aggregation and disaggregation which is enacted by the relationship between (a)

managers’ leadership practice (ie. their attempts at addressing the tension between directive and

delegative leadership) and employees’ distancing practices (ie. their attempts at addressing the

tension between connective and protective participating in RWAs).

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