Telework: a challenge to knowledge transfer in organizations

Abstract

Over the last decade, teleworking has gained momentum. While it has been portrayed as both employer- and employee-friendly, we question the positive normativity associated with teleworking by showing how it may endanger an organization's knowledge base and competitive advantage by threatening knowledge transfer between teleworkers and non-teleworkers. Drawing on the literature on knowledge we present the cognitive and relational components of organizational socialization as key facilitators of knowledge transfer and we demonstrate that teleworking may negatively affect these cognitive (shared mental schemes, language and narratives, and identification with goals and values) and relational (quality of relationships) components, depending on its frequency, location(s), and perception. Finally, we suggest some managerial avenues for addressing these potential negative side effects of teleworking.

Keywords:

• knowledge transfer
• organizational socialization
• organizational social knowledge
• teleworking

Acknowledgements

The authors address their gratitude to the reviewers who contributed to improve their work, as well as to Susanne Tietze, Jan-Willem Stoelhorst, and the IRRU's staff of the Warwick Business School, especially Paul Edwards, Paul Marginson and Sylvia Rohlfer, for their contribution to some issues mentioned here.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘teleworking’ rather than ‘telecommuting’. The former, mainly used in the European literature, refers to a broad variety of work arrangements including work from neighborhood work centers, clients' premises, or home and ‘working on the move’. In contrast, the latter focuses on working arrangements that allow avoiding commuting (Huws et al. 1990) and refers mostly to home-based teleworking (Venkatesh and Johnson 2002). The use of telecommuting as a synonym for teleworking may therefore complicates the conceptualization of telework by overemphasizing transportation, even in research where the focus is on another aspect of decentralized work (Sullivan 2003).