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1. Introduction
Remote working is not new (Hafermalz, 2020), but never before were so many organizations simultaneously forced to let their employees work from home as in 2020, when the COVID-19 crisis surfaced globally. This had significant implications for organizations, including how they could exercise management control (MC), i.e. “influence employees' behaviors in desirable ways” in order to achieve their goals (Merchant and van der Stede, 2007, p. 5). While certain types of MC, such as informal lunch gatherings, face-to-face meetings and direct observations were not possible anymore, the crisis fueled the use of new technologies to work, organize and communicate, offering managers novel control possibilities. The impact of these sudden changes is a largely unexplored area. In addition, MC changes in response to crises (cf. van der Stede, 2011) and their behavioral and motivational effects (Hall, 2016) have been identified as important areas for further research. Therefore, we explore this issue by carrying out a field study in Italy, the first European country to be severely hit by the COVID-19 crisis. Organizations such as professional service firms (PSFs) were likely to be affected by sudden shift to remote working since communication among colleagues and with clients was acutely limited, while prior research identified this as essential to deliver high-quality work and maintain control (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004). Our primary data consist of semi-structured interviews with employees working in large PSFs in the first half of 2020. We draw on self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) and Hafermalz's (2020) notion of voluntary visibilizing practices to theorize our findings related to employee responses.
This study makes two contributions. First, we explore how MC has changed in PSFs as a response to the sudden shift to remote working. We extend prior research on the crisis-control relationship (van der Stede, 2011; van der Kolk et al., 2015; Parker, 2020) and show how firms made MC-related changes, for instance by increasing the amount of calls and online meetings, and by using online platforms to monitor the work of employees. Second, we address calls to study responses of individuals to organization-level MC changes (Hall, 2016), by focusing specifically on behavioral and motivational aspects. We discuss how and why employees engage in voluntary visibilizing practices (Hafermalz, 2020), i.e. trying to...