A Framework for understanding organizational control in virtual work environments: integrating variance and process perspectives

Remote work arrangements have attracted increasing attention among researchers and practitioners and organizations are increasingly looking at them as a response toemployees' need of autonomy and flexibility and firms' goals of efficiency and agility. It is reasonable to assume that outcomes of remote work adoption in organizations are influenced by organizational dynamics, i.e. the interplay between control structures and collective actions of key change agents, remote workers and their office-based colleagues. In remote work environments, indeed, the physical distance puts into question the traditional monitoring structures based on visibility and presence, becoming an occasion for enacting changes both in managerial control practices and daily actions of controlled employees. Organizational studies have only recently started to explore the role of organizational control in these contexts and further research is needed for understanding the influence of control on outcomes produced by remote work. Drawing on literature on remote work arrangements and organizational control, the paper develops a conceptual framework that identifies and puts together drivers, forms and outcomes of remote work adoption with the complex process dynamics of organizational control. Specifically, the meta-analysis of existing theoretical frameworks on remote work is used to identify the antecedents and the outcomes of its adoption; studies on organizational control provide conceptual categories related to different forms of control and some key processes inherent to the organizational control dynamics. This study shows the advantages of studyingremote work arrangements by integrating a variance-based perspective with a processual and dynamic lens. Specifically, the elaborated framework opens up the complex dynamics of organizational control and makes explicit its linkages with both antecedents and outcomes of remote work adoption. The framework is suitable for mapping the still scanty existing research on the issue of organizational control in the context of remote work arrangements, identifying relevant research gaps and promising directions for future research.