Abstract
The challenge of control—the ways one party influences, regulates, and coordinates the behaviors of another to achieve organizational objectives—is central to all organizations. Autonomy, by contrast, is often recognized as in tension with control. Post-pandemic distributed work, widely associated with high autonomy, provides a particularly relevant context to examine the dynamics of autonomy and control. This dissertation investigates how autonomy and control are enacted and contested in post-pandemic distributed work, and the consequences for employees and managers.
Rather than actively monitoring employees or merely relying on their self-regulation, I found that managers’ agendas were significantly shaped and constrained by employees’ requests for oversight. Further, employees’ work hours did not necessarily extend despite high autonomy to work from anywhere at any time, whereas managers’ work hours tended to extend later into the evenings. Collectively, these shifts created new challenges for both employees and managers.
This project contributes to the control literature by illuminating a shift in both the directions and targets of control in distributed work. This includes a bottom-up form of control from employees to managers, in addition to the conventional top-down and horizontal forms. It further highlights an outside-in control dynamic in which nonwork demands increasingly shape workplace practices, in contrast to the prevailing inside-out view that work demands tend to dominate and encroach on personal lives.
By unpacking these reconfigurations of control, this project offers both theoretical and practical insights into the evolving landscape of work in the post-pandemic era.