Abstract:
Organisations are faced with a growing interest in flexible work arrangements
that enable employees to control where, when and for how long they work and
need to find ways to adapt and integrate these practices into work routines and
processes. Because these arrangements reduce employees’ facetime at the
office, doubts remain regarding their impact on collaboration within teams. In
this thesis I explore the impact of the use of part-time work, telework and
flexible working hours on collaboration within teams and the contextual features
that explain this relationship. Seven case studies were conducted in software
development teams in three organisations in The Netherlands and Belgium.
Findings suggest that telework, part-time work and flexible working hours
impact on collaboration within teams because of reduced passive facetime –
passive presence of team members at the office without necessarily engaging
in interactions with each other. Passive facetime was interpreted as availability
to others and an enabler to collaboration. A theoretical framework is put forth
outlining six sets of contextual features that impact on this relationship. At the
team-level, these included skill differentiation, task characteristics (task
complexity and goal clarity), temporal characteristics (temporal stability and task
urgency) and structural characteristics (regular face-to-face meetings, amount
of absence, predictability of absence and synchronisation of presence). At the
individual level, proactive behaviours were found to have an impact. Finally, the
whole framework is nested in and dependent on environmental characteristics,
in particular the organisational setting. This thesis contributes to theory by
outlining the double-faceted role of passive facetime in the relationship between
FWA use and collaboration, by delineating how structural characteristics can
provide teams with sufficient passive facetime, and by presenting a framework
explaining the influence of FWA use on collaboration and the features that
explain how and when this happens.
