The Relationship between Telecommuting and Technology - Essay Example

?Running Head: ORGANIZATION INTERVENTION Organization Intervention Organization Intervention Introduction Eddie Bauer Inc. is a US based retailers offering “signature outerwear, clothing, shoes, accessories and world-class mountaineering gear for men and women.” (Eddie Bauer, 2011: p. 1). Employee at Eddie Bauer Inc. has been reporting high level of stress and most of them are concerned with long working hours (Holbeche, 2009). Long hours may be defined as longer than a regular work week of 35 to 40 hours (Rochon, 2000). These long hours may be one reason that number of workers report a high level of stress at Eddie Bauer Inc. Some researchers contend employees who are spending more hours working have less time for family responsibilities, leisure activities or personal development (Rochon, 2000). It is therefore reasonable to assume these long hours of work would have a direct impact on employee’s work/life balance. Intervention Corporate America has seen a dramatic shift in work dynamics over recent years. Days of traditional 9-5 work done from within a corporate office building are evanescing and being replaced by the virtual office, a phenomenon known as telecommuting. Today more than ever before, workers are using portable electronic tools to carry out work away from a conventional office setting, often without leaving the home. In order to maximize the outcome of this new era, organizations will need to stay abreast to this shift, and will need to be to understand and grasp its intricacies. Telecommuting is one solution that can be used by Eddie Bauer Inc. to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the workplace. Previous research has proven it difficult to delineate a universally agreed upon and comprehensive definition of telecommuting. This is likely a result of the wide variety of tasks that can now be carried out remotely and the sheer number of ways in which accomplishment of these tasks can be achieved (Harpaz, 2002). Some have defined telecommuting as "whenever an employee is paid for work done at an alternative worksite and total commuting time is thereby reduced" (Gibson, Blackwell, Dominicis, & Demerath, 2002, p. 76). Others consider telecommuting to be working wherever is needed to in order to satisfy client needs (Gibson et al., 2002), and still there are other definitions of telecommuting incorporating self-employed, formal or informal agreements, and percentage of time spent working at alternative worksites. While many operationalizations of telecommuting have been presented, emphasis on the utilization of electronic communications from home or another location as the primary channel of contact between the paid work carried out and the employing organization, its members, and customers has been a consistent feature noted across literature to date (Gainey, Kelley, & Hill, 1999). This paper defines telecommuting as working from home on a regular basis and does not include supplemental or additional work taken home at night (Virick, 2002). Review of Intervention The first telecommuter on record was a Boston bank president who, in 1877, installed a phone line between his bank and home. Although telework was foreseen as a viable organizational possibility as early as 1950 (Hill et al., 1998), telecommuting itself was not formally introduced until the 1970's when companies considered telework a method of protection from fuel shortages during the OPEC oil crisis (Hill et al., 1998). Since its advent, interest in telework as an alternative to the traditional office setting for organizations has continued to grow (Siha & Monroe, 2006). Accompanying this interest has been a dramatic increase in the number of American teleworkers (Hill et al., 1998). Though an exact number of telecommuters has been difficult to quantify due to the lack of a universal definition, research estimated that the number of teleworkers increased more than tenfold in a decade to roughly 22% of the American workforce in 2001 (Gibson et al., 2002). With recent estimates of more than 28 million telecommuters in the United States, growing at approximately 11 % per year, telecommuting continues to become an omnipresent work arrangement (Golden, Veiga, & Simsek, 2006). While working from home itself is not a new phenomenon (Harpaz, 2002), the real change in recent years has been the essence of individuals working from home but within the structure of an organizational framework. In other words, individuals today are inhabiting functional organizational roles, carrying out organizational tasks and responsibilities, and maintaining continuous communications with other organizational members, customers, and stakeholders from remote settings outside of the traditional corporate facility. These interactions are existing primarily through modem technological communication channels (Harpaz, 2002). Research has credited the development and expansion of on-line technology as a main catalyst accelerating the telecommuting phenomenon (Harpaz, 2002). As of the year 2003, an estimated 61.8 % of all households in the United States had home computers, and 54.7% of American households had internet access (Day, Janus, & Davis, 2005), providing an opportunity to facilitate such a remarkable shift in work dynamics. This expansion, combined with a drastic evolution across the domain of computer technology itself, has made telecommuting conveniently accessible, and relatively inexpensive (Belanger, 1999). Job Satisfaction Of the many benefits of telecommuting posited by the popular press, the most often cited is increased job satisfaction (Golden & Veiga, 2005). The evidence to support this claim however, too is equivocal. Job satisfaction is the extent to which employees are satisfied or dissatisfied with their jobs, and has been found to be predictive of job tenure, counterproductive behavior, and withdrawal (Grandey, Cordeiro, & Crouter, 2005). Given the paramount importance of job satisfaction to organizations and resulting implications on job design, it is critical to gain an understanding of the predictors and hindrances of the construct. Some researchers have argued that telecommuting has a positive impact on job satisfaction (Golden & Veiga, 2005), allowing individuals to better meet non­ work and family related responsibilities. These findings are consistent with the realm of literature suggesting a positive relationship between work/life balance and job satisfaction (Aziz & Zickar, 2006). Conversely, other lines of research (Cooper & Kurland, 2002; Harpaz, 2002) cited disadvantages such as lack of professional support, impeded career advancement, an "out of sight out of mind" mentality, and of particular interest to the current study, an inability to separate work and home have been noted as negatively impacting the job satisfaction of telecommuters. Important to note here is that while there have been studies citing a positive impact on balancing work and family resulting from telecommuting, others have suggested that telecommuting can lead to an inability to separate the two spheres. While previous research has consistently identified a link between telecommuting and job satisfaction, the nature and direction of the relationship has been variable. Perhaps these inconsistencies are not inconsistencies at all, but are indicative of a complex relationship, one that is variable by nature and contingent on a number of factors. These equivocations in findings suggest the possibility of additional factors and relationships, still unaccounted for, playing integral roles in the telecommuting/job satisfaction relationship. However, likely due to the novelty of the subject area and its youthfulness in the literature, little scholarly attention has been given to exploring this possibility, or to the identification and understanding of how third variables may influence the telecommuting/job satisfaction relationship. In research attempting to reconcile such inconsistencies, Golden and Veiga (2005) demonstrated a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped relationship between the extent of telecommuting and job satisfaction, moderated by task interdependence and job discretion. More specifically, results suggested an increase in job satisfaction experienced by telecommuters at relatively low levels of telecommuting, tapering off and beginning to decrease at more extensive levels of telecommuting. Further, it was found that task interdependence, the degree to which organizational members must rely on one another to effectively perform job tasks (Golden & Veiga, 2005) moderated this relationship in such a way that telecommuters with high task interdependence experienced a slower rise in job satisfaction than those with lower levels of interdependence, with the most profound impact at the highest levels of telecommuting. Work Life Balance An implicit assumption lending support to the virtual work initiative has been that virtual work may decrease job stress by increasing flexibility and thus reducing work­, non work interference and overload (Raghuram & Wiesenfeld, 2004). However, scholarly research on the influence of the virtual office on work/life balance is both scarce (Hill et al., 1998) and inconsistent (Golden, Veiga, & Simsek, 2006). Research has suggested that family and work related factors, when interfering with each other lead to significantly lower job satisfaction (Samad, 2006). Expanding on this notion would insinuate lower levels of work/life balance to be marked by lower levels of job satisfaction. In research conducted by Hughes and Bozionelos (2007) to examine work/life balance as a source of job dissatisfaction and withdraw attitudes, a lack of work/life balance was found to be the predominant factor of concern and dissatisfaction among participants. In telecommuting research, family disruption has demonstrated an inverse relationship with satisfaction with a telecommuting job (Hartman, Stoner & Arora, 1992). In other words, higher levels of work and family interference are associated with lower levels of overall job satisfaction. Benefits The "virtual office" has been documented as an effective means of concurrently reducing corporate expenses while increasing productivity, morale, and work/life balance (Hill et al., 1998). Popular press has portrayed telecommuting as something of a panacea for work/life balance. Some scholars have suggested that the flexibility associated with telework is the solution to balancing work and home responsibilities (Jenson, 1994), in that working at home allows more efficient planning of leisure time and a balancing of other tasks to fulfill in the domains of family and community (Harpaz, 2002). Additionally, it has been posited that due to an increased presence at home, telecommuters are better able to meet family demands and more easily carry out face-to-face interactions with family members by avoiding electronic media that constrain such interactions. In this sense, work/family relationships are likely to improve through decreased work-family conflict. Taking this notion one step further, Golden (2006) demonstrated a partial mediation by work-family conflict in the relationship between the extent of telecommuting and job satisfaction, implying a pronounced drop in work-family life interference at extensive levels of telecommuting. Such findings lend support to the notion of a positive relationship between telecommuting and work/life balance. However, in contrast to increased work/life balance, others see the virtual office as having a more detrimental effect, in its potential to blur the boundaries between work and home life (Hill et al., 1998). Drawbacks A lack of boundaries or partitioning between the work and home domains can be an impending problem for telecommuters. As such, a major concern for many telecommuters is the potential for work and family to conflict when work is done in the home (Crandall & Gao, 2005). There have been contentions (Hill, 1996) that rather than enhancing family relationships, the virtual office can be "a cyberspace sweatshop" (p. 294), which blurs boundaries between work and home life. Olson and Primps (1984) found some telecommuters to exhibit characteristics of workaholism, a variable associated with decreased work/life balance (Aziz & Zickar, 2006), due to this inability to separate work and personal life. Companies with a large number of telecommuters might suffer from decreased corporate flexibility in an emergency situation. Telecommuting also decreases communication with co-workers and managers substantially, thus leading the cohesiveness of the team to decline. Telecommuting can also create problems with off­site technical breakdowns. Constant connectivity to the company network, and technical support may not be available quickly any time the teleworker needs them. It is also critical to provide additional training for remote workers on how to operate their hardware and software systems which is costly (Aziz & Zickar, 2006). Telecommuting demands a great deal of coordination and communications between the telecommuter and the home office. Therefore, start-up and operating costs that include; equipment rentals, computer accessories, communication devices, office furniture, satellite connection, training programs for teleworkers and managers, are too high to make telecommuting feasible for small organizations. Telecommuting can produce a loss in the social contact associated with today's office. When employees spend too much time working in isolation at home, they may cease to feel part of the organization. Feeling cut off and isolated could in turn lead to some psychological problems (Aziz & Zickar, 2006).. Loss of social contact may also cause "invisibility" which could be bad for one's career since the employee might lose the opportunity to make valuable contacts around the office and with businesses partners. Research conducted by Olson, found that about one third of all telecommuters felt that their chance of promotions were hindered due to their lack of visibility (Olson & Primps, 1984). In some cases, overeating and alcohol addiction can be a significant problem for the telecommuter who finds the refrigerator or liquor cabinet altogether too inviting. Some studies show that telecommuters work more on average, than office-based workers, and many of them turn into workaholics. Survey to Evaluate the Intervention 1. How many employees work in your company? 2. How many employees (full or part-time) telecommute in your company? 3. Are telecommuting programs cost-effective? Yes No 4. If you had the opportunity would you telecommute from home? Yes No 4 As a result of telecommuting, do you notice any change in your employee’s skills in the following areas? Productivity Communication Skills Ability to Work Independently Interpersonal Skills Personal Time Management Dependability Supervisory Skills Overall Performance 15. Please indicate to what extents do you agree or disagree with the following statements. Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree 1 2 3 4 5 Telecommuting has improved communications in my work group 1 2 3 4 5 Telecommunication allows employees to work during their most productive hours. 1 2 3 4 5 While telecommuting it is difficult to supervise the team. 1 2 3 4 5 Telecommuting program can also be exploited by employees and they can work less 1 2 3 4 5 Overall, the benefits of telecommuting programs outweigh the drawbacks. 1 2 3 4 5 Summary Telecommuting is one solution that can be used by Eddie Bauer Inc. to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the workplace. Telecommuting is an alternative work arrangement for employers that essentially takes the work to the worker instead of having the worker commute to work. Since 1990, the number of telecommuters has increased significantly; this phenomenal growth is attributed to the numerous benefits these programs provide for employers, employees, and society. Telecommuting benefits employers by increasing productivity and reducing costs. Employees are able to spend more time with their families and to reduce travel time and cost, and society benefits from less traffic on the highways, less fuel consumption, and less pollution. Telecommuting does not change the terms and conditions of employment, but for the benefit of all parties involved, there should be a written work agreement. The relationship between telecommuting and technology would naturally indicate continuing growth in the number of companies and employees utilizing telecommuting work arrangements. References Aziz, S., & Zickar, M. J. (2006). A cluster analysis investigation ofworkaholism as a syndrome. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 11, 52-62. Belanger, F. (1999). Workers propensity to telecommute: An empirical study. Information and Management, 35, 139-153. Cooper, C., & Kurland, N.B. (2002). Telecommuting, professional isolation and employee development in public and private organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23,511- 532. Crandall, W., & Gao, L. (2005). An update on telecommuting: Review and prospects for emerging issues. SA.M Advanced Management Journal, 70(3),30-38. Day, lC., Janus, A., & Davis, J. (2005). Computer and internet use in the United States:2003. US Census Bureau. Retrieved from http://www .census.gov /population/www/socdemo/computer.html. Eddie Bauer, (2011). Information Retrieved from http://www.eddiebauer.com/home.jsp Gainey, T.W., Kelley, D.E., & Hill, J. (1999). Telecommuting's impact on corporate culture and individual workers: Examining the effect of employee isolation. SA.M Advanced Management Journal, 64,4-10. Gibson, J.W., Blackwell, C.W., Dominicis, P., & Demerath, N. (2002). Telecommuting in the 21 st century: Benefits, issues, and a leadership model which will work. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 8, 75-86. Golden, T.D. (2006). The role of relationships in understanding telecommuter satisfaction. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27, 319-340. Golden, T.D., & Veiga, J.F. (2005). The impact of extent of telecommuting onjob satisfaction: Resolving inconsistent findings. Journal of Management, 31, 301­318. Golden, T.D., Veiga, J.F, & Simsek, Z. (2006). Telecommuting's differential impact on work-family conflict: Is there no place like home? Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(6), 1340-1350. Grandey, A. A., Cordeiro, B.L, & Crouter, A.c. (2005). A longitudinal and multi-source test of the work-family conflict and job satisfaction relationship. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 78, 305-323. Harpaz.T. (2002). Advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting for the individual, organization, and society. Work Study, 51,74-80. Harpaz.T. (2002). Advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting for the individual, organization, and society. Work Study, 51,74-80. Hartman, R.I, Stoner, C.R., & Arora, R.(1992). Developing successful organizational telecommuting arrangements: Worker perceptions and managerial prescriptions. SA.M Advanced Management Journal, 57(3), 35-42. Hill, E.J., Hawkins, A.J., & Miller, B.C. (1996). Work and family in the virtual office: Perceived influences of mobile telework. Family Relations, 34,293-301. Hill, E.J., Miller, B.C., Weiner, S.P., & Colihan, J. (1998). Influences of the virtual office on aspects of work and work/life balance. Personnel Psychology, 51, 667-683. Holbeche L. (2009). Aligning human resources and business strategy. Butterworth-Heinemann; 2 edition. Hughes, 1., & Bozionelos, N. (2007). Work-life balance as source of job dissatisfaction and withdrawal attitudes: An exploratory study on the views of male workers. Personnel Review, 36, 145-154. Jenson, G. (1994). Balancing work and family: Challenges and solutions. Logan, UT: Utah State University. Olson, M., & Primps, S. (1984). Working at home with computers: Work and non-work issues. Journal of Social Issues, 40, 97-112. Raghuram, S., & Wiesenfeld, B. (2004). Work-nonwork conflict and job stress among virtual workers. Human Resource Management, 43(2-3),259-277. Rochon, C. (2000). Work and family provisions in Canadian collective agreements. Human Development Canada, Labour Department, Hull, QC, 1-172. Samad, S. (2006). Assessing the effects of work and family related factors on women well-being. Journal of American Academy of Business, 9,52-57. Siha, S.M, & Monroe, RW. (2006). Telecommuting's past and future: A literature review and research agenda. Business Process Management Journal, 12(4),455­482. Virick, M. (2002). Managing a virtual workplace: An investigation of processes in virtual work. (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Texas at Arlington, 2002) Dissertation Abstracts International, 64(01), 219. Read More