Organizational Politics and Teleworkers: A Case Study

Abstract

The telework literature is clear, while work-life balance and productivity may increase for employees working outside of the office, professional isolation and co-worker dissatisfaction may also occur. Previous research has found that knowledge is transferred through networks and relationships, resulting in lower levels of knowledge transfer among teleworkers who have less access to office-based networking opportunities. We define an organizational political system as an informal system where individuals use networks and connections to obtain results. From this, we derive our primary research question: How do teleworkers use politics to compensate for some of the challenges associated with telework? To answer this, we conducted a case study within a Fortune 250 company, Midwest Global Manufacturing (MGM), to explore the use of organizational politics for office-based employees and teleworkers. Our findings suggest that teleworkers strategically leverage the informal system to compensate for the lack of traditional social interaction to achieve their personal and professional goals.