The effects of virtual management on employee behaviour in small and medium-sized enterprises

Abstract

The evolution and revolution in information technologies enabled many brick and mortar organisations to transform to a new model of business operation. This can be understood as "Virtual Organisations (VOs)". Needless to say, this transformation has profoundly impacted the nature of workplace and the relationship between employees and management. The face-to-face management and regular working hours amid other work norms have slowly diminished. Employees are not managed from close proximity as they can work in different locations and time zones. Amongst the predicaments of such transformation, the relations between the management (i.e. Virtual Management) and the employees (i.e. Virtual Employees) result in manifold challenges. For example, where Virtual Employees (VEs) are not managed face-to-face their underlying motivation and behaviour they exhibit can pose noteworthy questions to study. This research investigated such behaviour of employees under Virtual Management (VM) in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with to ascertain their attitudes and perceptions which would reflect in their work. This study broadens the empirical knowledge on VO/VM and the behaviour of VEs in the context of contemporary organisational behaviour. Furthermore, this research attempts to validate the importance of these behavioural factors in successfully running a VO in particular in SMEs. This study followed a mixed research method. For quantitative part, self-administrated questionnaires were distributed to a set of randomly selected SMEs located in Greater Western Sydney (GWS) region. 159 employees participated in the study, yielding a response rate of 15%. The study measured the three components of job attitude namely, job satisfaction, job involvement and organisational commitment. Cronbach's test was performed to check the reliability of the questionnaires as a research instrument. Non-parametric test Mann Whitney Rank was used to analyse data through SPSS. For qualitative part, nine VEs and nine non-VEs volunteered to participate in the semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews. Based on the findings of this study, which was reinforced by the literature review, the positive perceptions of employees toward their management tend to increase as the management type shifts from non-virtual to virtual. However, the attitudes of employees remain invariable as the management shifts from non-virtual to virtual. Thus, as VM effects the perception of employees then, their behaviour can also be affected by VM. Therefore, it maybe deduced that VEs are more contented than non-virtual employees. The researcher believes that these findings have both research and practical value as they can be potentially applied in a work place.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English