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New Ways of Working: Chances and Challenges for Trust-Enhancing Leadership

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Book cover Trust and Communication in a Digitized World

Part of the book series: Progress in IS ((PROIS))

Abstract

The continued rise of digitalization allows employees to be highly flexible regarding when and where to work, both inside and outside the traditional office, a trend captured in the term new ways of working (NWW). With NWW, increased employee flexibility changes the relationship between supervisor and employees, thereby posing both benefits and new challenges for leadership. For supervisors, NWW particularly complicate the nevertheless necessary task of exercising control over employees. In NWW supervisors often rely on electronic performance monitoring techniques as an alternative to traditional forms of supervisory control. Yet, since employees often perceive electronic monitoring as a signal of their supervisors’ distrust, these new monitoring systems can harm the employee–supervisor relationship. At the same time, by accepting the control and monitoring behavior of their supervisors, employees can form high-quality relationships with supervisors, which can in turn translate into greater productivity and mutual trust. By more closely tracing this process, the present chapter investigates how supervisors in NWW can effectively supervise employees by maintaining control while still expressing trust.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cellular offices are those with walls up to the ceiling and an office door.

  2. 2.

    Open-plan offices are commonly used workspaces without interior walls or enclosures that are shared by larger groups of employees with individual workstations often arranged in groups within the office environment (e.g., Brennan et al. 2002; Brookes and Kaplan 1972).

  3. 3.

    We refer to the classification proposed by Lyons (2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Philipp Romeike, Christina Wohlers, Guido Hertel & Gerhard Schewe

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Correspondence to Philipp Romeike .

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    Bernd Blöbaum

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Romeike, P., Wohlers, C., Hertel, G., Schewe, G. (2016). New Ways of Working: Chances and Challenges for Trust-Enhancing Leadership. In: Blöbaum, B. (eds) Trust and Communication in a Digitized World. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28059-2_9

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