Working apart together: How outcome control supports operations when working from home
研究在家办公情境下，团队领导依赖绩效信息的结果控制如何通过改善团队沟通有效性，提升成员任务绩效，对远程运营管理有实践启示。
Abstract Working from home (WFH) significantly impacts firms’ operations by introducing altered control challenges regarding the facilitating and influencing of decisions. WFH can drastically limit the control options that managers—according to organizational control theory—can rely on, particularly behavior control and informal control, shifting emphasis to outcome control. Yet, the effectiveness of outcome control can also be constrained in a WFH setting, potentially resulting in a control loss. We conducted a field study among all customer due diligence teams of Nordea bank, exploiting teams’ abrupt shift to WFH after the COVID‐19 disruption to examine how team leaders’ (TLs') reliance on outcome control based on performance information supported remote team operations and performance. Multilevel analysis of survey data collected in May/June 2020 from both TLs and team members (TMs) matched with other firm data shows that TLs’ reliance on outcome control supported favorable changes in TMs’ task performance after shifting to WFH. This effect is mediated by changes in team communication effectiveness, which, supported by performance information, enabled TLs to better manage team operations conducted from home. Collectively, our findings highlight the role of outcome control in supporting WFH by enabling remote team operations and performance.