Driving forward via the rear-view mirror
Today's employers appear to have a love-hate relationship with technologically facilitated work. According to Bloomberg News and others in the popular business press, 2017 was declared the year that the permanent telecommuter officially began to go extinct (Boss, 2017; Greenfield, 2017; Simons, 2017; Useem, 2017). This is somewhat surprising given the growth in policies since 2003 that are designed to support employee flexibility and work-life balance. According to the World At Work 2017 report on trends in workplace flexibility; "teleworking... is one of the only programs to show significant growth since 2013, and it is likely that this trend will continue as technology makes teleworking easier and more convenient than ever before" (p. 6). Indeed, some of the very same coverage sounding the death knell for telecommuters also highlights data from the Society of Human Resource Management that showed the percentage of organizations offering some type of telecommuting arrangement grew from 20% in 1996 to more than 60%in 2017 (Greenfield, 2017).
More than 70% of all employers and managers utilize flexible work arrangements in which the majority of the employee's time is still spent in a traditional office setting (Greenfield, 2017; World at work, 2017). Some firms that allowed full-time telecommuting, such as Yahoo and IBM, reversed these positions in recent years and recalled their full-time remote workforce to the office (Boss, 2017; Miller & Campell, 2013). The contradictory impulse to embrace mobility and location flexibility for employees while simultaneously rolling back distance-work policies has created organizational uncertainty for both managers and distributed employees alike.
While these recent highly publicized business decisions focused heavily on the full-time telecommuter, the reality is that this segment is simply the most visible and recognizable group that exists within a much larger established trend. The virtualization of work has become almost ubiquitous within the global workplace, leading most organizations to embrace virtual and distributed work practices within their organization (Greenfield, 2017; World at work, 2017).
Virtual work describes a work arrangement "in which employees operate remotely from each other and from managers" (Cascio, 2000, p.81). Virtual work is a necessary precondition for organizations to utilize distributed work arrangements in which "any of the following conditions are met... Individual workers are located in different physical locations; most normal communications and interactions, even with colleagues in the next office, are asynchronous. That is, they do not occur simultaneously, or the individual workers are not all working for the same organization, or are working within distinctively different parts of the same parent organization. They may have widely different terms of employment" (MacDuffie, 2007, p. 553).
In today's modern, often open plan working environment, distributed work is at once being done by both the lone telecommuter working from his or her home or other remote location, as well as the employee working in a more traditional office setting who, in order to do his or her job, must use technologically facilitated communication tools to collaborate with other employees who may be located some distance away, be it down the hall, on another floor of the building, across town, across state lines, or even across the globe.
While recent news indicates that the reputation of distributed work is on the decline, the reality is that it has become the way that organizations get their work done. Virtual work systems have grown to impact more than 1.3 billion workers (Johns & Gratton, 2013) since the technology to support it first emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Lipnack, & Stamps, 1999). This provides ample evidence of the importance for HRD researchers and practitioners to study the phenomenon, especially as it appears to be undergoing significant change. While some established firms are indeed retreating from some aspects of distributed work, its relevance to organizations and their employees is far from extinct. Despite the recent pullback, interest in distributed work arrangements continues to grow, especially for younger workers just entering the job market.
A LinkedIn.com poll found that among Millennials, 85% indicated a desire to telecommute full-time (Storr, 2016). In addition, the allure of low overhead, access to global talent pools, and flexible work-flows remain a powerful competitive tool for both established firms and startup enterprises in particular to leverage the potential of distributed work to improve organizational performance (Cascio, 2000; Leibowitz, 2016). The well-publicized corporate retreats of Yahoo, IBM, and other organizations from full-time telecommuters suggest that established organizations are failing to reap the expected benefits of the most easily recognized group of employees utilizing distributed work arrangements (Boss, 2017; Greenfield, 2017; Miller & Campell, 2013). Organizations have not yet learned how to best leverage the technology available to them to generate results. Therefore, this phenomenon is of key interest to both HRD researchers and practitioners who are charged with integrating the work of learning, performance, and change in service to their host organizations (Wang et al., 2017).
The fluid and potentially pervasive nature of virtual and distributed work is creating distinct challenges for organizational leaders and managers. As early as 2002, some studies reported approximately 60% of professional employees working at different geographic locations from their peers or direct managers (Kanawattanachai & Yoo, 2002). The U.S. Census Bureau's 2012 data reports that from 2002 to 2012 the number of individuals that reported working from home at least one day a week grew by approximately 35% to 13.4 million and the combined percentage of those regularly working from home at least two days a week or more reached 13.9% of all US workers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). In June 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that as of 2016, 22% of workers reported doing some or all of their work from home, a 19% gain from data collected by the Bureau in 2003.
The Bureau's report went on to note that those with advanced degrees (43%) reported working from home at almost twice the rate of general US workers (22%), and more than three times the rate of those with only a high school diploma (12%). This suggests that virtual work is continuing to grow and it is growing fastest among highly skilled workers in the knowledge economy. In addition, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, the vast majority of those that do not work from home still report regularly meeting with others on their workplace teams as well as others within their organization over distance (Maurer, 2015) and almost a third of workers in some studies indicate that they regularly engage in distributed work (Brewer, 2015).
The purpose of this systematic review is to identify and describe the properties of distributed work, to highlight the need for research from an HRD perspective, and to provide a theoretical model for effective managerial leadership behaviors with employees engaged in distributed work that leads to meaningful outcomes for organizations seeking to make use of these work arrangements. The research questions informing this review are threefold:
1. What are the properties of distributed work that pose unique management challenges within the context of established organizations?
2. What conceptual relationships and outcomes may be predicted or influenced by managerial behaviors when applied to employees engaged in distributed work?
3. What are the mechanisms through which managerial behaviors impact employee attitudinal outcomes (job satisfaction) in the context of distributed work?
After reviewing the literature search methodology, this review provides an examination of the existing literature from multiple academic disciplines related to distributed employee outcomes, organizational leadership and management behavior, organizational context, and culture.
The literature review is structured in seven sections. The initial section covers the nature of distributed and virtual work in order to examine the case for a differential approach to research and identification of best practices. Section two articulates the elements of organizational culture that may impact remote work arrangements and positions the importance of the organizational and environmental context in which that work is carried out. The third section presents the literature on managerial and leadership behaviors and styles. The fourth section examines employee outcomes and the centrality of job satisfaction among worker attitudes. The fifth section positions a general model of the relationships between managerial behavior, perceived proximity, and employee outcomes that is tailored to distributed work applications. Section six presents future research implications and section seven provides a summary of the review.
Literature Review Methodology
Publications were identified, sorted, and examined following Torraco's (2016) staged review process. Keyword searches were used with several online databases including Business Source Complete, Education Source, Emerald, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, PsycINFO, SAGE: Management and Organization, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Wiley Online, and Google Scholar. Relevant search terms included: virtual work; virtual team; distributed work; distributed team; virtual competence; remote employee; telecommuter; telecommuting; telework; virtual management; remote managerial and leadership effectiveness; and e-leadership. Initial results included more than 3,360,000 articles with the term virtual work and at least one other term including distributed, remote, employee, employer, manage, lead, or culture. After an initial search and citation evaluation for relevant literature, the search parameters were refined to include references to virtual teams, telecommuting, or telecommuters, competence, and e-leaders or e-leadership. Lastly, a chain-review or snow-ball review process was employed whereby the reference lists for all of the articles deemed relevant were evaluated for additional relevant literature.
Publications were selected for inclusion based on the degree to which they engaged with the phenomenon of distributed or virtual work, the organizational context or workplace culture, management or leadership behaviors, and employee outcomes. Selected works provided conceptual definitions, insight into related concepts and behavior mechanisms, and pointed to associated relationships or constructs of potential value to employers, HRD practitioners, and researchers looking for insight into how to drive organizational learning, performance, and change within the context of distributed work. A total of 227 publications were deemed sufficiently relevant to include.
Virtual Work
Virtual work and distributed work arrangements are most often defined in terms of how those doing the work differ from traditional, or collocated, employees. Collocated workers are “individuals who are physically located close together and can work in face-to-face contexts” (Brewer, 2015, p. 8). A distributed or virtual worker, on the other hand, generally either cannot collaborate in person with at least some number of his or her colleagues within the organization or chooses not to do so in order to work more efficiently by communicating and collaborating through some form of technology-facilitated means (Lipnack & Stamps, 1999; Lurey & Raisinghani, 2001; Montoya-Weiss, Massey, & Song, 2001; Staples & Ratnasingham, 1998; Warkentin, Sayeed, & Hightower, 1997).
While this definition may initially seem straightforward and clear in the context of an individual employee who is a full-time telecommuter, it can cause some confusion when applied more broadly to an organization. For example, few would intuitively consider an employee working in an office with a large number of other employees of the organization to be a remote or virtual worker. However, for organizations with teams spread over large office buildings or in multiple locations, many of these employees will be physically separated from their managers and may collectively represent a distributed workforce that relies on communication technologies to organize and carry out their work without face-to-face communication. Virtual and distributed work must therefore have a unique description that is not defined in opposition to something else. Instead, it should be defined in reference to its own characteristics (Montoya-Weiss et al., 2001).
Golden et al., (2009) and Purvanova (2014) define distributed work as an organizational structure in which an employee engages in distributed or virtual work including telework, telecommuting, remote work, geographically dispersed, geographically distributed, and virtual work. Distributed work arrangements therefore may exist at any number of levels including the individual, team, department, division, or organizational level.
The single most important defining characteristic of distributed and virtual work is the relative absence of face-to-face contact with coworkers when compared to more traditional employment arrangements (Hakonen, & Lipponen, 2008; Kirkman, Rosen, Tesluk, & Gibson, 2004; Warkentin et al., 1997). While physical distance is also commonly associated with distributed employees and virtual work, there is no consensus on a specific threshold of geographic separation beyond which one is considered a remote employee or part of a distributed team (Kraut, Fussell, Brennan, & Siegel, 2002; Wilson et al., 2008).
In their meta-analysis of telecommuting literature, Gajendran and Harrison (2007) point out the central theme of connection, both psychologically and operationally, with other employees within organizations for remote employees. Given that distributed employees are generally separated from some or all of the other employees with whom they work (Brewer, 2015), this highlights a second characteristic of distributed work: the existence of organizational networks mediated and facilitated by ubiquitous technology (Rasmussen & Wangel, 2007; Shachaf, 2008; Wilson et al., 2008). While most modern employees rely on technology to assist in the completion of their workflow, distributed work arrangements are distinguished by their singular reliance on technology for both their work outputs and their interactions with other members of the organization (Brewer, 2015; Darics, 2017). In short, "communication technology bridges physical distance" for distributed employees (Herd, 2016, p. 44) regardless of how small or large that physical distance may be.
A third defining characteristic of distributed employees and virtual work is that of reduced oversight and direct supervision (Herd, 2016; Rockmann & Pratt, 2015; Walvoord, Redden, Elliott, & Coovert, 2008). While some may point to the existence of nanny-ware (West & Bowman, 2016), or user-monitoring software tools, as a digital stand-in for managers being able to physically observe their distributed employees, it generally represents a negative managerial presence that exacerbates feelings of distance and distrust (Wilson et al., 2008). Reliance on such digital tools has been shown to undermine employee's feelings of autonomy and reciprocal trust, while also straining managerial comfort with evaluating employees based solely on their results (West & Bowman, 2016; Wilson et al., 2008). As a result, managers frequently report greater difficulty managing their remote employees (Cascio, 2000; Cascio & Shurygailo, 2003) or expressing a preference for their duties related to their collocated employees over their remote staff even when there is no discernible difference in employee productivity between the two groups (Simons, 2017).
The Emergence of the Remote Employee and Distributed Workforce
The study of distributed work in its various forms first emerged as an area of serious social science research in the mid-1990s with Warkentin et al.'s (1997) exploratory study comparing the effectiveness of virtual teams using a web-based conference system to communicate and organize their work relative to other teams working face-to-face. While early research along these lines concluded that computer-based teams could not outperform traditional teams working face-to-face (Warkentin et al., 1997), it nonetheless recognized the reality that many organizations were already regularly using technology to bring together teams of employees from geographically and organizationally dispersed areas for a variety of workplace tasks. It also set the stage for one of the foundational works on the subject.
Lipnack and Stamps (1999) heralded distributed work, in the form of virtual teams as the "21st century organization[al]" solution needed "to meet the rapidly changing demands of the business environment" in the "age of the network" (p. 14). Their work would become one of the most widely cited early works into the emergence of distributed work. Its publication coincided with the crest of the first wave of virtual work that would eventually grow to impact more than 1.3 billion workers within the next few years (Johns & Gratton, 2013). The foundation for distributed work was laid by the emergence of virtual work that burst onto the American work scene "on a large scale [beginning] in the early 1980s, when... virtual workers using nascent e-mail networks emerged. The new connectivity allowed an individual who might otherwise have worked inside a company, or at a specialized vendor serving a company, to set up a one-person shop instead" (Johns & Gratton, 2013, p. 4).
This new breed of employee was physically "removed from the immediate sphere of influence of management and co-workers" (Jackson, Gharavi, & Klobas, 2006, p. 219) in a way that they had never been before. They were no longer tied to a specific office, location, or support infrastructure to complete their work. While the impact of this first wave is still being felt today, it merely set the stage for what was to come as these virtual freelancers gave way in the early 2000s to the second wave when corporations began adopting newly available technology on a wider scale (Johns & Gratton, 2013).
While many of the organizations that embraced this technology no doubt did so primarily seeking their own organizational efficiencies, this also brought with it the ability for many employees to decouple their job responsibilities from a single physical location:
"As interoffice communication has shifted from face-to-face conversations and paper memos to voice mail and then e-mail, it matters less and less whether colleagues are on the same wing or even the same continent. With virtual work serving the interests of both employees and employers, the number of highly skilled and untethered people has risen exponentially. Office-based infrastructure is less relevant, replaced by smarter personal technology and cloud computing. Top talent increasingly values—and demands—work-life balance. IBM, an early convert, has reached the point where more than 45% of its 400,000 contractors and employees work remotely" (Johns, & Gratton, 2013, p. 5).
However, the initial exuberance of the second wave did not last. Employers realized that in their zeal to embrace the future, some had undercut what they felt to be the natural advantages in teamwork and social support that come with the traditional work environment (Greenfield, 2017; Pillis & Furumo, 2007).
Likewise, some workers began to question whether their distributed work lives lacked a sense of community and social richness. Some distributed workers at IBM suggested that what IBM really stood for was "I’m by myself'" (Johns & Gratton, 2013, p. 5). These feelings gave rise in the 2010s to a less naive, and more targeted approach to distributed work and its underlying virtual work that has come to be characterized as the third, and current, wave of literature. Employers and researchers are asking increasingly targeted questions about "when virtuality help[s] or hinder[s]" the performance of individuals and teams (Schaubroeck & Yu, 2017, p. 1; see also Johns & Gratton, 2013). In addition, the current wave of distributed work has given rise to an even newer phenomenon of third-party run co-working spaces in which employers allow their employees the freedom to cross-pollinate ideas with employees from completely different organizations through the use of communally occupied, third-party owned work environments that help address feelings of social and creative isolation that are sometimes associated with distributed work (Bouncken & Reuschl, 2016).
The Need for a Differential Approach.
While few deny its potential benefits, it is no longer a foregone conclusion for many companies that virtual and distributed work are the wave of the future. Organizations have learned that there is also a cost to workplace virtuality and physical distribution that some organizations may not be willing to pay (Pillis & Furumo, 2007). With large tech companies such as Yahoo and early adopters of virtual work such as IBM going so far as to recall their remote workforce (Boss, 2017; Miller & Campell, 2013), there is a clear need for HRD research and best practices. Organizational leaders and HRD practitioners must be armed with the latest insights if they are to realize distributed work's technologically facilitated promises of lower costs, larger talent pools, and greater organizational flexibility without compromising the culture of the organization or its connection to its employees.
The Organizational Culture and Context of Distributed Work Arrangements
Organizational culture is most commonly defined as the pattern of values, attitudes, and beliefs, shared by a particular group of people which affect their behavior (Hoffman, & Shipper, 2012; Hofstede, 1998). Hofstede's (1998) work assessed culture primarily by assessing shared values and common group referents with the most important research findings coming from issues of congruence or conflict as it relates to culture's impact on the interaction between the individual and the organization.
The wildly disparate experience and work processes of collocated and distributed employees (MacDuffie, 2007) represent a significant step away from the kinds of shared experience that underlie the concept of organizational culture, leading to the expectation that the two groups are likely to develop their own unique cultural contexts that, while related by dint of the larger organizational connection, are also different from each other (Zakaria, Amelinckx, & Wilemon, 2004). For leaders of established organizations seeking to harness the benefits of distributed work arrangements, an understanding of the relationship between organizational culture and employee outcomes is critical for those likely to be simultaneously managing employees that experience the organization through disparate cultural contexts.
Cultural divergence-convergence theories. Research into management practices across differing cultures can be roughly divided into those that view management practices as culturally divergent or convergent (Hoffman & Shipper, 2012). The culturally divergent school (Hostfede, 2011; Jogulu, 2010; Taras et al., 2010) represents the majority of cross-cultural management research which seeks to identify the boundary conditions associated with the differing cultural norms, ideologies, and standards of behavior that make certain management practices effective in their culturally bound context.
Alternately, the culturally convergent research paradigm seeks to identify universal practices that transcend cultural boundary conditions. This model attributes the existence of universal practices to a number of underlying homogenizing causes including the forces of globalization, communication technology, and international bodies of academic management accreditation such as the AACSB (Hafsi & Farashahi, 2005; House et al.,2004; Hoffman et al., 2014). Given its intimate relationship to the forces of globalism and communication technology, the culturally convergent paradigm is particularly attractive to researchers looking to identify managerial best practices for distributed work.
For culturally convergent researchers, management constants have been described along multiple dimensions including the simple universal, in which a given practice holds true in all circumstances, variform universal in which only subtle changes need to be made to make management behaviors comply with employee expectations, and functional universal practices in which the relationship between various management and leadership behaviors and employee outcome variables remains consistent in direction even if the exact expression of the behavior or the strength of the relationship may change (Den Hartog et al., 1999). Research into management constants that can be applied to a distributed workforce offers a promising avenue of research that may bolster management confidence and reduce leadership discomfort for those looking to utilize remote workers. Such research would be of particular value to managers and organizations that are just beginning to embrace distributed work or that are struggling to cope with the management challenges that come with it.
Digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital native, a term often applied to those highly skilled at navigating distributed work systems, was a term first coined by technologist Mark Prensky in a series of articles starting in 2001. He used the term to describe individuals with "an innate confidence in using new technologies" that informed the way in which they lived their life in a "permanent state of technological immersion and dependence" (Selwyn, 2009, p. 365).
Initially applied to the so called net-generation born between 1977 and 1997 (Tapscott & Williams, 2008), who were young children when the first wave of virtual work emerged in the 1980s (Johns & Gratton, 2013), the term enforced the "common perception of [a] generational divide and disjuncture, with present cohorts of children and young people ascribed distinct technological characteristics that set them apart from their elders" (Selwyn, 2009, p. 365). The phrase has also been used more generally to describe those with a seemingly innate level of comfort and skill with various forms of technology (Akçayır, Dündar, & Akçayır, 2016; Margaryan, Littlejohn, & Vojt, 2011). This broader use of the term appears to have matured with the cohort to which it was first applied as those workers born in 1977 represent mid-career professionals who will be entering their 40s in 2017.
At an organizational level, a digital native organization would therefore be one in which reliance on technology to complete both the work of the organization and to interact with other employees is the norm. In addition, the use of that technology for a digital native organization represents little to no extra effort on the part of its employees or leaders, and is a setting in which it is safe for all parties to assume a certain base level of comfort and familiarity with a broad set of communication technologies in addition to any work-flow technology that may be required for specific job functions. Many startup organizations are considered digital native organizations by virtue of necessity. They have used technology, virtual work, distributed work arrangements, and virtual supply chains to manage costs or access key talent to begin operations (Boell, Cecez‐Kecmanovic, & Campbell, 2016).
Digital immigrants, by contrast, are characterized in binary opposition to digital natives. They are older, established in their habits, slow to recognize the value of technology, linear in thought, resistant to change, and wary of untested technology (Bayne, & Ross, 2007; Evans, & Evans, 2017; Salomon, 2014). A digital immigrant organization therefore is characterized by a dominant culture that can safely assume ready face-to-face interaction as the most readily accessible and abundant form of communication. Many of these firms may also have business models that were successfully established prior to the first wave of virtualization in the 1980s and their use of technology is generally motivated by desire to improve existing operations. In short, digital immigrant organizations must navigate an extra technological learning curve as they adapt their baseline assumptions for how members of their organization will communicate and interact with one another.
The technological motivations for established organizations generally represent a bid to adapt to outside forces in the hope of becoming more lean, responsive, and nimble (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). Mature digital immigrant organizations most often focus their efforts on adopting new technologies to lower cost, increase access to talent regardless of their geographic location (Cascio, 2000), or to position flexibility on the job as a workplace benefit (Hakonen & Lipponen, 2008; Purvanova, 2014). However, these organizational aspirations can have significant unintended consequences (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; Rockmann, & Pratt, 2015).
A major cultural hurdle for digital immigrant organizations seeking digital naturalization is the paradox of perceived proximity (Chae, 2016; Wilson, et al., 2008). Perceived proximity is "a dyadic and asymmetric construct which defines one person’s perception of how close or how far another person is... unlike ‘objective distance,’ which can be observed or calculated by others, perceived proximity is known only to the focal person " (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 983). It encompasses the paradoxical phenomenon of feeling psychologically close to certain geographically distant colleagues as well as the fact that one can feel psychologically distant from those who may be in close physical proximity through a dynamic combination of communication, social identification, and socio-organizational processes (Wilson et al., 2008).
While managers that understand the factors contributing to the perceived proximity may be able to "achieve many of the benefits of co-location without actually having employees work in one place" (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 979), those unfamiliar with it risk the accidental alienation of their followers and lower quality relationships that are commonly associated with employees who spend more than 2.5 days away from the office (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007). Simply put, "[t]reating proximity and distance in purely physical terms provides an incomplete view of how people experience it" (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 980). For organizations seeking to embrace distributed work arrangements that may include employees separated by as little as a few feet to as distant as the other side of the globe, an understanding of proximity as a psychological and cultural construct is critical.
The way in which organizational leaders, managers, and fellow employees interact will determine the extent to which distributed employees feel subjectively connected to the organization and the extent to which the organization will be reciprocally connected to its distributed employees regardless of their objective distance to an organizationally meaningful geographic location. "Because managers do not have a good model of what influences relationships at a distance, they resort to bringing team members together face-to-face (conditions with which they are familiar)" (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 994). In other words, distance is not entirely an objective phenomenon.
Another potential pitfall is the inability of managers to cope with parallel cultures-within-a-culture for organizations with an established and dominant culture operating primarily face-to-face among its executive teams while also utilizing distributed employees. This organizational reality may lead to a disconnect between leaders who are digital immigrants with authority to make decisions and those digital natives who carry out the work (Rockmann & Pratt, 2015). While managers and organizational leaders of digital immigrant organizations may be able to do much of their work face-to-face, remote employees cannot. Indeed, while worker outputs and objectives are generally the same for both distributed and collocated employees, the methods by which they execute their work duties are often vastly different from traditional employees (MacDuffie, 2007). Remote employees must either be fluent in the technology that allows them to do their work or develop the fluency of a digital native quickly by dint of the fact that they have no other means of creating value for their organization without it (Mechanic, 1962; Zakaria et al., 2004). This lack of familiarity with the technology used by their distributed employees may pose a significant challenge for managers and organizational leaders charged with obtaining results through physically distant employees. After all how can you manage people and processes that you can't see (Helms, & Raiszadeh, 2002) when you don't know how the underlying technology works that makes distributed work possible?
Managerial Leadership Behavior
In periods of uncertainty and transition, there is often an increase in the number of companies deciding to move away from remote work arrangements while simultaneously acknowledging that remote workers are just as productive as their collocated counterparts (Simons, 2017). This suggests that organizational attitudes toward distributed work and the organization's ability to employ it as a competitive strategy may have as much to do with the firm's beliefs about managerial technique as it has to do with actual productivity.
Kruger and Dunning (1999) illustrated the potential impact of discrepancies between one's self-assessment and actual skill level when evaluating one's self-performance. The their theory holds that those least skilled within social and intellectual domains are least aware of their own performance deficiencies. Meanwhile the most highly skilled tend to project their own level of skill onto others, rendering themselves unaware of the degree to which their skill is the exception rather than the rule.
At an organizational level the consequences of the Kruger-Dunning mechanism are clear and potentially costly as they relate to distributed work: leaders who fail to generate results through employees engaged in distributed work are more likely to blame their poor results on the fundamental character of the distributed work system itself rather than their own behavior or lack of managerial skill. On the opposite extreme, those organizational leaders who are able to generate superior results through their native talent are more likely to assume that such results can be achieved relatively easily by others and that there is little reason to document and capture their leadership techniques as best practices to be shared with others. This suggests that to properly study the phenomenon of distributed work, one must also understand leadership and the extent to which managers demonstrate leadership behaviors in context in their organization.
From Great Man and trait-based to behavior theories of leadership. Among the earliest leadership theories to flourish in twentieth century Western leadership literature were the so called Great Man theories (Bolden, Gosling, Marturano, & Dennison, 2003; Spector, 2016). Male dominated and originating largely within a military tradition, the theory posited that leaders were born with certain innate qualities or traits that set them apart from others (Stogdill, 1974). Under this paradigm, as championed by Thomas Carlyle as early as the 1840's, leadership development was less a process of creating new leaders and more a process by which circumstances were created in which natural leaders could emerge and be recognized. Leaders were not made; rather, they were discovered (Spector, 2016).
While the majority of modern leadership scholars have moved beyond the great man theory and the search for a universal set of leadership traits (Stogdill, 1974), some scholars have revisited the idea of universally applicable insights into contemporary leadership behaviors. Those searching for universal leadership attributes believe that examining the "impulses that drive us toward authority figures... can, and should offer valuable insights into how we—scholars, observers, and participants in the business world—react to corporate saviors" (Spector, 2016, p. 250). The search for comfort and familiarity provided by great man savior figures echoes the simplistic faith currently being evidenced by firms moving away from telecommuting policies in the belief that simply bringing their employees back to an office will automatically improve their organizational effectiveness. While scholars have moved beyond the widespread belief in the great man theories, humanity has not moved beyond the tendency to believe in simple solutions to complex organizational issues.
Trait-based theories eventually gave way to behavioral leadership theories in the 1940's that focused less on who leaders are and more on what they do (Bolden et al., 2003; Northouse, 2016). Largely dividing leadership actions into either task-oriented or relationship-oriented activities, behavioral leadership research has observed numerous different combinations of effective leadership behaviors and has classified them into various 'styles of leadership' (Blake, Mouton, & Bidwell, 1962; McGregor, 1960). In describing the behavioral leadership paradigm, it is important to understand that the theories do not posit the existence of a single "correct" way to lead. "The behavioral approach works not by telling leaders how to behave, but by describing the major components of their behavior. The behavioral approach reminds leaders that their actions toward others occur on a task level and a relationship level" (Northouse, 2016, p. 79).
The 1960's gave rise Situational Leadership theory with the work of Hershey and Blanchard who built on Reddin's 3-D management style theory and ultimately led to the creation of Blanchard's formal Situational Leadership Model II in 1985 (Blanchard, Zigarmi, & Nelson, 1993; Bolden et al., 2003). Situational Leadership posits that every situation demands its own kind of leadership. Therefore, the central job of effective situational leaders is to monitor their environment and adapt their style to fit the demands of the situation at hand (Northouse, 2016). While behaviorists focus on either task-oriented or relationship-oriented activities, situational leadership categorizes leadership behaviors as directive, telling people what and how to do something, and supportive, ensuring that they have the knowledge and resources necessary to complete their goals (Blanchard et al., 1993). The effective situational leader understands both the competence and commitment of followers and adjusts his or her leadership style to meet the followers' needs.
The importance of meeting follower needs is underscored in both the path-goal and contingency theories of leadership. As a refinement of situational leadership, Contingency Theory attempts to identify the situational variables that best predict the most effective leadership style that a leader can adopt to meet the needs of his or her followers (Bolden et al., 2003; House, 1971). Path-Goal Theory builds on this approach by identifying follower motivations and positioning the goal of leadership as the desire "to enhance follower performance and follower satisfaction by focusing on follower motivation" (Northouse, 2016, p. 115). However, rather than adapting leadership style to meet the competence and commitment of one's followers as a situational leader might, the path-goal leader instead attempts to modify his or her style to meet follower's motivational needs (House, 1971).
Transactional theories, such as Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory, came into being in the 1970s as researchers began to establish the ways in which leaders and followers jointly impacted each other as individuals rather than as a class (Gerstner & Day, 1997). "[B]efore [leader-member exchange] theory, researchers treated leadership as something leaders did toward all of their followers... in a collective way... [that] implied [a successful application of] an average leadership style" to their followers as a whole (Northouse, 2016, p. 137). A key concept in the early development of LMX theory is the idea of in-groups and out-groups that form "based on how well they work with the leader and how well the leader works with them" (Northouse, 2016, p. 138). This aspect of LMX theory has particular relevance for distributed work situations as relationships with collocated followers may develop into in-group relationship or be perceived as such by those working at a distance.
LMX's initial focus on group differences in which in-group followers receive a greater share of the mutual benefits of the leader-follower relationship with greater access to information, organizational resources, social influence, and leader-follower relationship quality relative to out-group followers, eventually gave way to more general research focusing on ways that leaders and all of their followers can improve the quality of their reciprocal relationships to improve organizational effectiveness (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). Specifically, LMX research indicated that high-quality leader-member exchanges were associated with reduced employee turnover, positive performance evaluations, career advancement opportunities, higher levels of employee commitment, as well as a host of other desirable organizational outcomes (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). Furthermore, this avenue of LMX research suggested that the development of out-groups was not a foregone conclusion and that leaders and followers could cultivate high quality leader-member exchanges with each other as a matter of collective choice rather than organizational destiny (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
Among the most recent leadership theories to appear in the literature is Transformational Leadership Theory. While the term transformational leadership was first used by Downton in 1973, transformational leadership literature did not emerge in force until the 1980s and early 1990s, just as the first wave of virtual work technologies began impacting the U.S. economy and organizations struggled to cope with the massive change that came with it (Johns & Gratton, 2013). Therefore, it is not surprising that the central focus of transformational leadership is on the role of the leader as it relates to navigating organizational change (Bass, 1990).
Transformational leadership "is concerned with emotions, values, ethics, standards, and long-term goals...satisfying [the] needs [of followers] and treating them as full human beings" often using charismatic or visionary leadership techniques (Northouse, 2016, p. 161). Transformational leadership seeks to transcend transactional concepts such as organizational rewards between mutually benefitting parties and instead seeks the establishment of a meaningful connection between leaders, employees, and organizations that inspires employees to become better and more motivated versions of themselves (Bass, 1990). Transformational leadership is about forging meaningful connections between the inner lives of employees, the mission of the organization, and leaders "learning to share the vision" (Bass, 1990, p. 19) for how to navigate into an uncertain future.
Importantly, leadership theories do not specify the organizational level at which "[l]eadership" occurs; it is simply "a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal" (Northouse, 2016, p. 6). While leaders may exist at all organizational levels, it is common for employees to define leadership as being associated with a higher organizational ranking than themselves. Many use the term management and leadership as synonyms in their daily work (Hamlin, 2004). Practitioners have attempted to apply numerous leadership theories to management development programs without consistent results: "[w]ritings about leadership... are not much clearer today than [they] were twenty-five years ago about what is a good leader and what a leader should be doing" (Schein, 2010, p. x). This has led some researchers once again to search for universal leadership constants, however, not in the form of traits from the great man era. Instead, they seek generic or universal leadership behaviors that can be discovered by empirical observation.
Hamlin's (2004) generic model for managerial and leadership effectiveness is one such attempt explicitly derived from an HRD perspective. Refuting the assertions of Avolio, Bass, and Jung (1999) that the lack of generalizability in leadership and management literature is due primarily to research design issues, Hamlin (2004) built on the work of Hamlin (1987), Thompson, Stuart, and Lindsay (1996), Bass (1997), House and Aditya (1997), Bennis (1999), Russ-Eft and Brennan (2001), and Agut and Grau (2002), who suggested the logical and theoretical existence of universal or generic leadership and management behaviors. Hamlin (2004) explored three empirical research studies on leadership and managerial effectiveness in the United Kingdom using qualitative research techniques to interrogate the data for fresh insights and to build an empirically derived generic set of universally effective management and leadership behaviors.
Utilizing an open coding technique within a grounded theory approach, the author examined the data and findings from three quantitative studies that examined leadership and managerial effectiveness in three separate public-sector organizations. Managerial effectiveness was evaluated from multiple perspectives in all three studies including self-evaluation, top-down evaluation of managers by their organizational superior, and the bottom-up perspective in which managers were rated by their direct reports. With the help of two additional co-researchers, the team coded their data separately and then triangulated their findings to identify "the extent of internal generalization between the criteria of managerial effectiveness" across all three studies (Hamlin, 2004, p. 198).
The resulting generic model of managerial and leadership effectiveness identified six positive leadership criteria and five negative criteria that were common to all three studies. The six positive criteria were: 1. effective organization and proactive planning/management; 2. participative and supportive leadership/proactive team leadership; 3. empowerment and delegation; 4. genuine concern for people and their developmental needs; 5. open and personal approach/inclusive decision making; and finally 6. communication and consultation that keeps a wide range of stakeholders informed. The five negative criteria were: 1. lack of consideration or concern for staff/autocratic or dictatorial style; 2. uncaring behavior including self-serving, undermining, and intimidation; 3. tolerance of poor performance and avoidance behavior; 4. abdication of leadership/managerial roles and responsibilities; and finally 5. negativity and resistance to new ideas (Hamlin, 2004). For organizations and leaders seeking to increase the effectiveness of distributed work systems, these broadly applicable leadership behaviors represent a framework for evaluating managerial behavior and avoiding the Dunning-Kruger (1999) trap of misattribution for employee outcomes.
Employee Outcomes and Job Satisfaction
Managerial behavior has been shown to have a positive relationship with employee outcomes such as organizational and occupational commitment, job satisfaction, job involvement, and work group effectiveness (Chen & Aryee, 2007; Hui et al., 2004; Meyer et al., 2002;). For behavioral researchers, the connection between managerial behavior and job satisfaction is of particular interest as it represents "a pivotal construct" that is also among "the most frequently studied variables in organizational behavior research in both the theoretical and empirical terms" (King & Williams, 2005, p. 176).
Among the earliest definitions of job satisfaction is Locke's 1976 definition from the Handbook of Industrial Psychology which defines job satisfaction as “a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences" (p. 1300). This initial definition has been refined over time to include two distinct elements: affect and attitude. The affective component of job satisfaction encompasses one's emotional response to one's employment. The attitudinal component of job satisfaction represents an "evaluative judgment made with regard to an attitudinal object" (Weiss, 2002, p. 175). It is the individual's assessment and evaluation of how he or she feel about it. A full understanding of job satisfaction therefore requires one to understand both the employee's right-brain emotional response to work as well as the summative product of the employee's left-brain evaluation regarding the perceived self-relationship with his or her work. The relationship between managerial behavior and job satisfaction also creates a theoretical link to other outcomes that are known to be related to job satisfaction including absenteeism, organizational commitment, customer-oriented behaviors, customer satisfaction, job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, turnover/retention, employee health, and psychological well-being (King & Williamson, 2005; Meyer et al., 2002; Wilkin, 2013).
Culture, Leadership, and Job Satisfaction: An Integrative Research Model for Distributed Work
Among the most far-reaching integrative conceptual frameworks for organizational studies in the HRD literature is Gilley and Gilley's (2002) organizational system blueprint. It offers a theoretical model for understanding organizations in their unique context and how each of the ten different organizational components including the external environment, the organization's mission and strategy, its leadership, culture, work climate, management, structure, policies and procedures, processes, and individual and collective performance interact to influence the eleventh and final component of the model, the organization's ultimate performance results. While the model excels at providing a holistic view of an overall organization that is useful for diagnosing organizational dysfunction and managerial malpractice (Gilley, Gilley, Ambort-Clark, & Marion, 2014), it has yet to be empirically validated in its totality. Also, while the model's breadth and depth represent a tremendous source of value to HRD practitioners, it also represents a challenge for researchers with a narrower research agenda for which a more parsimonious research model would be preferable.
Hoffman and Shipper (2012) offer one such model that may be contextualized as a subset of the larger Gilley and Gilley (2002) system blueprint. They position the iterative reciprocal relationships in the Gilley and Gilley (2002) model between the environmental context, leadership and management practices, culture, and individual and work group outcomes as a more linear model which draws heavily from the right side of the Gilley and Gilley (2002) model (see Figure 2) The Hoffman and Shipper (2012) model allows for closer examination of the role of culture as it informs the relationship between managerial behavior and employee outcomes in a way that may be particularly useful when applied to studies done in the context of distributed work.
"[D]ifferent cultures reflect different values" (Hoffman & Shipper, 2012, p. 1414) and the recent string of high profile companies such as Reddit, Yahoo, and IBM moving away from full-time telecommuting work arrangements demonstrates the organizational value that managers are currently placing on physical proximity and its more familiar forms of managerial oversight and control (Boss, 2017; Greenfield, 2017; Miller & Campell, 2013; Simons, 2017). However, this value set is diametrically opposed to the values of many employees who choose distributed work opportunities because they place a high value on autonomy, privacy, and flexibility (Simons, 2017) and sets the stage for potential organizational culture clashes between distributed employees and the larger organization (Spokane, Meir, & Catalano, 2000).
Understanding the needs of distributed employees in terms of culture and managerial behavior is especially useful given that Hoffman and Shipper's (2012) results indicated that the presence or absence of negative effects from cultural mismatches were largely a function of managerial behavior. Hoffman and Shipper's results "indicate that cultural values tend to have a greater effect when a manager is less skilled than when the manager is highly skilled. When the manager is highly skilled, the interaction effects of culture tend to disappear" (2012, p. 1414). This represents a critical insight for organizations given that managerial skill and the behaviors that come with it can be developed and deficits can be overcome.
The role of managerial behavior in determining the extent to which culture influences employee outcomes is consistent with research into universal leadership/manager behaviors that are effective regardless of the cultural context (Hamlin, 2004). Furthermore, managerial behavior is especially important to study in distributed employee populations as "[l]eaders often say ‘I like my co-located team better than my [remote] team, but the work gets done just as well'" (Simons, 2017, p. 1). This suggests that while distributed employees may be just as productive as traditionally collocated employees, it is the behavior of the manager, and by extension the organization, that likely matters most in determining whether remote employees are integrated into the cultural fabric of the organization or whether they become a type of secondary class company citizen that is isolated from the rest of the firm.
Moreover, the general model may be particularly useful in studying attitudinal outcomes related to culture and managerial behavior as the
"cultural interactions appeared to be more important when examining the managerial skills–attitude relationship than the skills–effectiveness relationship...For other outcomes – job attitudes – a divergent view (cultural variations exist) is supported when managers exhibit low levels of managerial skills while a convergent view (no cultural variation) is more evident when managers exhibit higher skill levels" (Hoffman & Shipper, 2012, p. 1430).
This suggests that cultural factors have a greater impact on employee outcomes when managerial behaviors indicate lower levels of skill and that this impact is greater for feeling-related employee outcomes than for performance-related outcomes. Given the recent flurry of firms cutting back on remote work arrangements based on manager sentiment rather than employee productivity, it would seem prudent to select this model to engage in focused research in a distributed work context to determine the relationship between managerial behavior and attitudinal employee outcomes such as job satisfaction.
However, to apply the Hoffman and Shipper (2012) model to a distributed work context, some modifications are required. Culture is ultimately about shared values and mental models between groups of people with a common sense of identity (Hoffman & Shipper, 2012; Hofstede, 1998). This sense of closeness stemming from shared experience and communal identity is also at the heart of the concept of perceived proximity (Wilson et al., 2008) and for distributed employees, especially those who may telecommute or work in physical isolation, it may well represent the single most important aspect of the way they experience the culture of the organization in their daily work. While any study involving cultural issues would likely benefit from incorporating perceived proximity as a cultural variable, for research into remote employees or distributed teams, it is vital.
Perceived proximity was first proposed as the product of a number of sub-factors including communication, identification, socio-organizational factors, and individual factors related to each employee (Wilson et al., 2008). It is a subjectively experienced attitudinal variable that is constructed of elements that can be measured objectively as well as those that cannot. Frequent meaningful and interactive communication is the most visible contributor to perceived proximity. These repeated communications build mental salience, the extent to which physically distant individuals remain top of mind, by creating opportunities for individuals to envision each other's context and thus reduce uncertainty as to the motivations or potential actions of others.
The second building block of perceived proximity is identification or the "self-categorization with respect to others" (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 986) that is impacted by three core processes: creating a basis for common ground (a process which is shared with communication); reducing uncertainty; and engendering positive attributions when real data are absent. The third sub-factor is socio-organizational and includes both the individual's organizational network structure, including the breadth and depth of relationships with others in the organization, and structural assurances or the "conditions that make things seem safe and fair in an organization" at the individual level (Wilson et al., 2008, p. 987).
These structural assurances are remarkably similar to the established procedural justice variable in social science research; however the way in which it must be applied and understood for remote or distributed workers is unique in that it is experienced by the employee through the consistent adoption of communication technology that makes individuals and the team as a whole more salient (Wilson et al., 2008). To use a concrete example, managers and leaders at the home office need to be as good at using remote communication technology as the remote employees. If leaders must allocate extra time in meetings to troubleshoot technology or avoid its use due to personal preference, distributed employees cannot be assured of equal access and mental salience relative to their collocated peers.
Another critical structural assurance mechanism identified by Wilson et al. (2008) is role clarity; which many managers and leaders fail to provide their followers regardless of whether they work face-to-face or over distance (Walvoord et al., 2008). The final perceived proximity sub-factor is the combination of the individual employee's openness to the remote work experience and the cumulative perceptions formed from any prior experiences with dispersed work.
In 2014, O'Leary, Wilson, and Metiu streamlined and condensed the multi-factor conceptual framework for perceived proximity into a single-factor model that includes affective and cognitive elements. As with other subjective social science variables, such as job satisfaction, the affective aspect of perceived proximity encompasses one's feeling of emotional closeness to other employees or the organization (O'Leary et al., 2014). Meanwhile, "[t]he cognitive component refers to a mental assessment of how close or far a teammate seems" (O'Leary et al, 2014, p. 1222). Perceived proximity involves both the individual's assessment of closeness to another entity and an evaluation of how he or she feel about it.
O'Leary et al. (2014) demonstrated that perceived proximity completely mediates the relationship between relationship quality and both objective distance as well as communication. In addition, perceived proximity was shown to be positively related to shared identity (β= 0.47, p < 0.01) and to play an even more important role than either objective distance or shared identification when examining workplace relationships. Given culture's role as the vehicle through which employees experience a sense of shared identification, values, and behavioral norms, this suggests a very close theoretical compatibility between culture and perceived proximity for researchers operating within a distributed work context.
For those looking to equip organizational leaders to improve organizational performance through technology, a theoretical framework is necessary to guide research into the behavior that will be required of its front-line leaders to succeed and the nature of their relationship with their employees within a technologically mediated context. Integrating Gilley and Gilley's (2002) Organizational System Blueprint, Hoffman and Shipper's (2012) culture, managerial behavior and employee outcomes model, and Hamlin's (2004) universal managerial and leadership behaviors, with Wilson et al.'s (2008) perceived proximity variable results in the research model explored by this study.
Research Implications
The research model represents a synthesis of the three distinct streams of literature: 1. virtual work, remote employees, and distributed teams; 2. organizational culture and cross-cultural management; and 3. managerial and leadership effectiveness. The model positions the current state of knowledge in each stream within a larger theoretical framework for practitioners seeking to encourage specific individual and organizational outcomes as well as researchers looking to explore and quantify the concepts, variables, mechanisms, and relationships associated with distributed work.
The study represents a significant contribution to distributed and virtual work literature while also adding to the theoretical understanding of managerial leadership behaviors as applied in a distributed or technologically mediated context. The model contributes to theories of managerial and leadership effectiveness with distributed and collocated teams in ways that can continue to be empirically tested and refined by future research. The addition and incorporation of perceived proximity as a cultural variable provided insight into mechanisms that may explain previously confounding results in the distance work literature (Wilson et al., 2008). In addition, the model also identifies concrete and generalizable managerial leaderships behaviors that organizations can utilize to positively impact the outcomes associated with distributed work. It is imperative for organizations to understand the dynamics of distributed work with enough predictive understanding to manage it effectively.
In addition to providing practitioner insights, the model suggests additional avenues of research. While the model incorporates perceived proximity as an element of culture, more research will be needed on the numerous other variables and constructs whose relationship to perceived proximity may be extrapolated based on what this study has shown about its relationship with job satisfaction. "At the individual and dyadic levels," Wilson et al. (2008) "expect perceived proximity to predict willingness to work together in the future and beliefs about the efficacy of working at a distance" (p. 993).
However, it is also worth noting that excess levels of perceived proximity may be associated with negative outcomes such as feelings of hyper-surveillance or an unwillingness to listen to others because at high levels of perceived proximity one may assume that her or she already knows what others plan to say or are thinking. At unhealthily high levels, perceived proximity may actually undermine or subvert the underlying mechanisms of shared identification to destructive ends. Lastly, as a relatively new research construct, perceived proximity may also be successfully employed in more traditional work arrangements to begin exploring more fully the mechanisms through which collocated employees and teams feel close to one another and the impact that such closeness may have on the organization's performance.
Summary
This review identified and described the properties of distributed and virtual work and culminated in a synthesized theoretical research model that examined the role of managerial leadership behaviors that can be applied within a distributed work context. The examination combined multiple streams of academic literature including those related to distributed employee outcomes, their antecedents, managerial leadership behavior, organizational context, and culture.
The review started with an assessment of the nature of distributed and virtual work and examined the case for a differential approach to research and practice in a distributed context. The second section examined elements of organizational culture that may impact distributed work arrangements and positioned the importance of the organizational and environmental context for distributed employees and their leaders. The third section reviewed the literature on managerial and leadership theories related to behaviors, styles, and effectiveness. The fourth section highlighted the centrality of job satisfaction among worker attitudes and its importance in exploratory and emerging research areas for HRD scholars while the fifth section built on the previous segments by synthesizing a general model of the relationships between managerial behavior, perceived proximity, and employee outcomes that is uniquely tailored to research within the context of distributed work. Finally, the future research implications of the synthesized model were discussed along with the role of perceived proximity as an emerging construct in behavioral and organizational research.
