Working apart together: How outcome control supports operations when working from home

Working from home (WFH) significantly impacts firms’ operations by introducing altered control challenges regarding the facilitating and influencing of decisions. WFH can drastically limit the control options that managers – according to organizational control theory – can rely on, particularly behavior control and informal control, shifting emphasis to outcome control. Yet, the effectiveness of outcome control can also be constrained in a WFH setting, potentially resulting in a control loss. We conducted a field study among all customer due diligence teams of Nordea bank, exploiting teams’ abrupt shift to WFH after the COVID-19 disruption to examine how team leaders’ reliance on outcome control based on performance information supported remote team operations and performance. Multilevel analysis of survey data collected in May/June 2020 from both team leaders and team members matched with other firm data shows that team leaders’ reliance on outcome control supported favorable changes in team members’ task performance after shifting to WFH. This effect is mediated by changes in team communication effectiveness, which, supported by performance information, enabled team leaders to better manage team operations conducted from home. Collectively, our findings highlight the role of outcome control in supporting WFH by enabling remote team operations and performance.