Cross Cultural Differences in Managers’ Support for Home-Based Telework

Abstract

Home-based telework is one of the arrangements organizations can introduce to facilitate a better balance between employees’ professional and private lives. This article focuses on the question of under what conditions managers grant a subordinate’s request to telework and what role national cultures play herein. By looking into managers’ willingness to delegate power and to trust home-based teleworkers we try to explain the slow adoption of home-based telework and the reported differences across Northern and Southern European countries. In doing so we will make use of Hofstede’s writings on national cultures and of the propositions made by the telework literature on how to mitigate the potential trust problem associated with distance working. The purpose of the article is to develop new hypotheses regarding factors that influence managerial decision-making concerning telework and how these interact with national cultures. To test the hypotheses, a cross-national vignette study is proposed.