The Effects of Distant Work During the Pandemic on Organizational Structure

The current business environment has witnessed a paradigm shift as organizations adopt remote work programs as mechanisms to keep operations. These phenomena call for restructuring of business strategies and agendas to fit the current working environment. Thus, against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper was to review literatures pertaining to distant work on organizational structure amid the pandemic and to outline a conceptual framework that could be verified and tested by future studies. By adopting a literature review perspective, the conclusions made by the paper was that distant work has led to structural changes of organizational designs as managers tends to adopt more of supportive leadership styles and participatory decision-making processes. Also, the environment has provided employees with high level of autonomy and benefits of balancing-work life activities. Nonetheless, its impact on productivity shows a negative direction as employees are bothered with family responsibilities while at home particularly those with children. Besides, the virtual space has weakened employees’ collaborations and knowledge sharing levels as individuals tends to perform their tasks in isolation. As a practical implication, the correction of such situations requires managers devising programs and strategies that promotes employees’ team spirit while working from home. Due to the nature of the study, the conclusions made by the study were not empirical tested. Thus, as relevant areas of interest, the study has outlined areas that could be look by future researchers.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].