THE EFFECTS OF TELEWORK ON EMPLOYEES’ COMMITMENT AND ADAPTIVE PERFORMANCE: A PERSPECTIVE ON THEORIES OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR IN A SITUATION OF DESPATIALIZATION

Abstract

English

Teleworking alters our relationship to the traditional work environment in terms of time, place, and action, raising questions about the consequences for behavior within organizations: How can organizations maintain the commitment of teleworking employees? And how can they assess employees’ performance remotely? In a context of despatialized work, organizations are asking themselves these two key questions, the relevance of which is greater than ever in a receptive, post-pandemic professional context. Taking a transactional approach that understands work and its organization as sources of satisfaction and motivation, we posit that these affects are influenced by the evolution of the work environment and its characteristics. The objective of this theoretical article is to understand the effects of telework on employees and their organizational behavior by examining the satisfaction of basic needs related to the work environment in which the employees evolve. To this end, it offers a literature review on the effects of telework in terms of commitment, performance, and satisfaction of basic psychological needs (autonomy, development, demands). Above all, it allows us to: i) confront the spatiality of the theories of organizational behavior with this work situation, marked by despatialization, ii) propose using the concept of adaptive performance to assess performance, iii) show the limits of studies on telework due to the lack of psychometric tools adapted to the analysis of this particular work situation. Finally, following a transactional-integrative-multifactor approach, we define the model for our future research and discuss the opportunities to develop the concepts in this area.