Co‐workers working from home and individual and team performance

• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Zoltán Lippényi,Tanja Lippe
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12153
• Published date: 01 March 2020

60 New Technology, Work and Employment

© 2019 The Authors.

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Co‐workers working from home and

individual and team performance

Tanja van der Lippe and Zoltán Lippényi

The number of rms supporting work from home has risen

dramatically as advances in communication technology have

fundamentally transformed the way humans cooperate. A

growing literature addresses working from home, but focuses

only on individual workers, overlooking potential inuence

of co‐worker engagement. Our aim is to study the inuence of

co‐workers working from home on individual and team perfor-

mance. We use unique data from a large‐scale survey involv-

ing nine European countries, 259 establishments, 869 teams

and 11,011 employees to show that the impact of working from

home by co‐workers on performance is considerable and has re-

mained hidden in past studies because they did not account for

co‐worker effects. While working from home may be useful for

some workers, it does bring issues for them as well. Specical-

ly, we demonstrate that co‐workers working from home nega-

tively impact employee performance. Moreover, team perfor-

mance is worse when more co‐workers are working from home.

Keywords: working from home, performance, employees, co‐

workers, organisations, multilevel

Tanja van der Lippe (t.vanderlippe@uu.nl) is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at

Utrecht University, Head of the Department of Sociology, and Chair of the Research School ICS. Her re-

search interests are in the area of work–family linkages in Dutch and other societies, for which she has

received a number of large‐scale grants from Dutch and European Science Foundations. She received a

European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for her research into “Investments in a sustainable

workforce in Europe.” She is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Scienc-

es (2014), the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (2013), and the European Academy of

Sociology (2010). Her edited books include Quality of life and work in Europe: Theory, practice and policy

(Palgrave, 2011), Competing claims in work and family life (Edward Elgar, 2007), Women’s employment in a

comparative perspective (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001), and A sustainable workforce in Europe (Routledge, 2019).

Zoltán Lippényi is Assistant Professor of Organizational and Economic Sociology at the University of

Groningen, the Netherlands. He is a member of the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory

and Methodology (ICS) and the ISA RC28 Social stratication and Mobility. He obtained his PhD in So-

ciology at Utrecht University in 2014. Between 2014 and 2018, he worked as a post‐doctoral researcher

with the ERC‐nanced Sustainable Workforce project, focusing on the consequences of organizational

employment practices, in particular, the adoption of exible work and employment arrangements for

workplace inequality and employee outcomes. Since 2015, he has represented the Netherlands in the

Comparative Organizations and Inequality Network (COIN), a research collaboration studying work-

place wage inequality from an international perspective. In this collaboration, he studies the effects of

organizational context and change on inequality in wages, using register‐based linked employer– em-

ployee datasets. His work is published in the European Sociological Review, Research in Social Stratication

and Mobility, History of the Family, and Social Science Research.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Co-workers working from home and performance 61

© 2019 The Authors.

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Introduction

Working from home is rmly entrenched in modern working life and has become rou-

tine for many employees (Society of Human Resource Management, 2016; Vilhelmson

and Thulin, 2016). Against the backdrop of a growing number of dual‐earner couples,

working from home was touted in the 1980s and 1990s as a cost‐effective option for

improving employee performance by enhancing their work–life balance (Avery and

Zabel, 2001). The practice even received institutional support, as both the US Congress

and the European Union approved legislation supporting telecommuting arrange-

ments for both private and public workers. Nowadays, the European Agreement on

Telework improves the protection of people working from home and lays down rules

to ensure they enjoy the same rights as other employees. In the United States, the

Telework Enhancement Act helps employees enhance work–life effectiveness.

Extensive prior research has focused on the inuence of working from home on em-

ployee performance (Bailey and Kurland, 2002; Gajendran and Harrison, 2007;

Martínez Sánchez et al., 2007; De Menezes and Kelliher, 2011; Allen, Golden, and

Shockley, 2015). The results of this research are, however, mixed: while some studies

show that working from home leads to better performance (Vega, Anderson, and

Kaplan, 2014; Allen et al., 2015), others warn that working from home leads to social

and professional isolation that hampers knowledge sharing (Crandall and Gao, 2005)

and leads to the intensication of labour (Kelliher and Anderson, 2009; Felstead and

Henseke, 2017). This paper provides a new explanation of why working from home

inuences performance, and the aim is to gain insight into the inuence of co‐workers

working from home on individual work performance. We argue that work perfor-

mance is inuenced not only by a particular worker’s working from home, but also by

the extent to which his or her co‐workers work from home.

The impact of co‐workers remained hidden in past studies because their focus was

restricted to the individual worker (Avery and Zabel, 2001) or to the organisation as a

whole (Martínez Sánchez et al., 2007), omitting the interplay between the individuals

and their social environment within the context of their work. Studies of organisational

behaviour are highlighting that the growing interdependence and complexity of tasks

necessitates an analysis of how co‐workers inuence organisational behaviour and

outcomes (Chiaburu and Harrison, 2008; Vayre and Pignault, 2014).

In particular, our research meets a growing demand in the literature that behaviours

of others in the workplace be studied to gain a better understanding of the individual

behaviour of employees (Spreitzer, Cameron, and Garrett, 2017). We build on the no-

tion that co‐workers cooperate and provide each other various forms of support that

are essential to the functioning of the individual employee (Collins, Hislop, and

Cartwright, 2016). In the context of teleworking, Windeler, Chudoba, and Sundrup

(2017) show that maintaining a certain level of social interaction is important for em-

ployees’ functioning when they work from home. We extend the argument to conclude

that teleworking impacts not only the performance of those employees who are en-

gaged in it, but also their co‐workers, regardless of whether the co‐workers are en-

gaged in telework. Disentangling the inuences of individual and co‐worker

teleworking is relevant because it provides management with a more complete assess-

ment of the potential problems created by telework. To our knowledge, Golden (2007)

is the only study to take the teleworking of co‐workers into account, but he focuses on

co‐worker relations and analyses a single rm, and in his study, the percentage of co‐

workers working from home is reported only by the individual employee.

In addition to analysing individual performance, this paper addresses the impact of

working from home (as part of a team) on manager‐reported team‐level performance.

The organisational literature on working from home often considers performance out-

comes only at the level of individuals (De Menezes and Kelliher, 2011). However, mul-

tilevel theorists argue that performance of teams consists of more than simply adding

up the individual efciencies of each team member (Kozlowski and Klein, 2000: 17).

Rather, team performance emerges out of the complex interplay between individual