Teleworking: Frameworks for Organizational Research

TLDR

Teleworking involves remote work for at least part of the time, commonly at home or in the field, and represents a radical shift from traditional workplace arrangements that is increasingly accepted as a flexible work practice. The paper builds an explanatory model of organizational teleworking adoption, integrating existing incidence literature to provide a theoretical framework for explaining differential growth across organizations, industries, and countries. The authors construct a multivariate framework that distinguishes various teleworking forms and use it to develop a model and propositions about the adoption of those forms.

Abstract

Teleworking is a work practice that entails remote working for at least some of the time. Common arrangements include work done at home or in the field, by teleworkers in a range of occupations. As such, telework is one of the most radical departures from standard working conditions in the suite of flexible work practices now gaining widespread acceptance. In this paper, we develop an explanatory model of organizational adoption of teleworking. We do this as a means of integrating the current literature on the incidence of teleworking and to provide a theoretical grounding and framework for understanding differentials in the growth of teleworking in different organizations, industries and countries. We begin by developing an appropriate framework for conceptualizing teleworking. We propose a multivariate approach that is able to differentiate the various forms of teleworking. We then use this framework to develop a model and a series of propositions concerning the adoption of different forms of teleworking. Neo‐institutional theory, as well as recent empirical evidence on teleworking informs this model.