Remote Control: Organisational Control and Monitoring in Distributed Teams

Abstract

Qualitative data from interviews and diaries show that for managers in distributed teams, monitoring their team’s attitudes is vital. Monitoring attitudes is theorised to be a necessary part of enacting informal controls, essential for knowledge work where formal behaviour and output controls are likely to be insufficient. This suggests an extension to Ouchi’s (1977) influential Behaviour-Output framework to incorporate monitoring attitudes. Impression management and lack of physical proximity is shown to be a potential disruptor of attitude-related monitoring for managers. Pastoral control is then introduced to explain how managers utilise relational techniques to solicit information necessary for monitoring attitudes, and the role of context in enacting organisational control is explicated.