Control dynamics in the context of remote work arrangements

Abstract

This thesis aims to respond to the following research question: how does remote work affect control and what types of control are more suitable for this context? Organizational control is in fact fundamental for company success, also in the case of remote companies. However, in these firms the distance between manager and employee and the consequent lack of direct supervision request managers to consider and face some new aspects and challenges. In this thesis we try to identify and analyze these new control dynamics and to do so, we first provide the readers with a theoretical part to make clear concepts used and give a literature overview. Therefore we analyzed the concept of organizational control and its mechanisms, we delved into the phenomenon of remote work by describing its prevalence, advantages, and disadvantages and finally, we reviewed academic literature about organizational control in remote work. After this theoretical part, to answer to our research question, we made a qualitative research based on involved companies’ interviews. We tried to discover together with these firms what remote work challenges are in terms of control and above all which solutions, so managerial actions and interventions can be effective to ensure an alignment between employee behaviors and company goals. Thanks to the interviews and the thematic analysis performed, we discovered that, despite of lack of presence and direct supervision, loss of control could be avoided and alignment between individuals’ behaviors and the company’s goals can be ensured through the use of traditional forms of control ( mainly results control, personnel control, and cultural control, to a lesser extent action control) but adapted to a new managerial approach based on trust, autonomy, empowerment characterized by a people-centric view and a coaching leadership style.