Projects

Telework is one of the recent trends in Human Resource Management. However, do we really know what that means for our relationships towards our employees? Due to the distance between employee and leader communication has to be done mainly through virtual media (such as chat, mail, phone). Following the findings of media richness theory, distrust might be more likely to occure when working virtual than face to face. Coming from the idea of the control circle, leaders tend to control the more, the more they do not trust their employees. In virtual realtionships with less face to face comunication trust is harder to build and sustain. Thus, the tendency to control is very high. However, control does not have to affect trust in a negative way. Following the work of Verburg et al. (forthcoming),Romeike/Nienaber (2016), we know that control is able to enhance trust. But what do we do, when not less trust is an issue between employee and leader but distrust! Is control actually able to reduce distrust? To answer this research question, we conduct a survey with a multinational organisation in Vienna that has to relay on telework.