Remote work’s implications to an organizational culture for innovation : leaders and experts’ experiences

Abstract

Remote work, where employees work from dispersed locations and communicate through virtual channels, has drastically grew after the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholars and leaders have expressed concerns how remote work might affect organizational cultures, and if the cultures will get diluted within the virtual world. Now that teams and organizations can be more dispersed than ever, it is important to understand its effects on organizational cultures, and especially to innovation promoting ones, that are based on values and aspects which require interactions, teamwork and highly participative community, values that have previously been sustained at the office where communication happens face-to-face. As the current literature has mainly focused on remote work’s effects on certain innovation culture’s values or on how to foster a remote innovation culture, this study aims to explore the different implications, challenges and positive aspects that remote work poses to an innovation culture, with the aim of understanding the innovation culture within the context of remote work better. The objective is to depict remote work' effects through the experiences of leaders and experts, since this study contemplates culture from the functionalist and rationalist theoretical perspective, where culture is viewed as something that an organization have, a variable, that management uses to align the employees for the wanted strategic goals, such as innovation.

This study begins with a literature review, drawing on the research from organizational culture, innovation, innovation culture and remote work, to create a theoretical basis for the empirical part of the study. The study is conducted as a qualitative study, using a phenomenological research approach, which can be used for the research of phenomena and person’s firsthand experiences. Six different innovative organizations leaders and expert’s experiences are explored, and the data was collected through semi-structured thematic interviews. The data was analysed by the means of thematic analysis, and the analysis was conducted in a data-driven way, as the phenomenological research criteria suggests.

The data analysis revealed that remote work poses mainly challenges for innovation culture’s key factors like communication, teamwork, trust and diversity, but some positive aspects were also found regarding diversity and collaboration. The main findings show that communication was experienced to be more transactional and work-related due to the used communication tools and the distance between organizational members. The leaders and experts experienced that remote work makes trust development harder, which affects the interpersonal relationships and makes the development of a safe creative environment harder. The findings showed that when the communication and collaboration environment was virtual, it was experienced that the creativity was lower and quicker solutions were more easily made. Diversity aspect divided experiences, since virtual communication tools increase the possibility to connect across different borders, but it also makes it easier to only be in contact with your usual connections. Overall, this study contributes to the existing knowledge and research of innovation culture and remote work, by expanding our understanding of the different implications remote work poses to an innovation culture.