Abstract
The number of firms supporting work from home has risen dramatically as advances in communication technology have fundamentally transformed the way humans cooperate. A growing literature addresses working from home, but focuses only on individual workers, overlooking potential influence of co-worker engagement. Our aim is to study the influence of co-workers working from home on individual and team performance. We use unique data from a large-scale survey involving nine European countries, 259 establishments, 869 teams and 11,011 employees to show that the impact of working from home by co-workers on performance is considerable and has remained hidden in past studies because they did not account for co-worker effects. While working from home may be useful for some workers, it does bring issues for them as well. Specifically, we demonstrate that co-workers working from home negatively impact employee performance. Moreover, team performance is worse when more co-workers are working from home.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 60-79 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | New Technology, Work and Employment |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2020 |
Funding
We thank Siyka Kovacheva (Bulgaria), Jouko Nätti (Finland), Sonja Drobnic (Germany), Eva Fodor (Hungary), Maria Guerreiro (Portugal), Teresa Castro‐Martin (Spain), Margaretha Bäck‐Wiklund (Sweden), Stefan Szücs (Sweden) and Suzan Lewis (UK) for support with the data collection in their own country. Data are archived at the UU Repository and are available from the corresponding author upon request. The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007‐2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 340045. 1
Keywords
- co-workers
- employees
- multilevel
- organisations
- performance
- working from home