Purpose

This study aims to examine how companies persuaded their employees to be present at offices during the COVID-19 pandemic and how remote and non-remote work practices affected employee performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Firm strategies are assumed to follow the principles of legitimacy and efficiency. However, these principles are often contradictory and incompatible. This study explored how companies legitimized non-remote work during the pandemic in Japan, and how in-person work practices affected individual employee productivity. The authors conducted a survey in the country, and the collected data was quantitatively analyzed.

Findings

On the basis of our empirical study on institutional work providing rationales for maintaining existing business practices, the authors found that Japanese companies often used institutional logics that included the inevitability of employees’ obedience to company policy, the lack of employees’ digital resources at home and the necessity of face-to-face customer dealing to legitimize their non-adoption of telework, even amid the emergency. The findings also indicate that the adoption of in-person work was negatively related to individual employee performance.

Originality/value

The current study aims to make a theoretical contribution to the literature on institutional maintenance and institutional work, which, till now, has only focused on institutional change rather than institutional maintenance. Second, few studies have empirically investigated the contradiction between legitimacy and efficiency, although the literature on organizational legitimacy assumes that individuals and organizations are not always rational.

中文翻译：

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合法性与效率：在 COVID-19 大流行期间在日本公司实施面对面工作

目的

本研究旨在研究公司如何在 COVID-19 大流行期间说服员工在办公室工作，以及远程和非远程工作实践如何影响员工绩效。

设计/方法/途径

假设企业战略遵循合法性和效率原则。然而，这些原则往往是相互矛盾和不相容的。这项研究探讨了在日本大流行期间公司如何使非远程工作合法化，以及面对面工作实践如何影响员工个人的工作效率。作者在国内进行了调查，并对收集到的数据进行了定量分析。

发现

基于我们对制度工作的实证研究为维持现有业务实践提供了理论依据，作者发现日本公司经常使用制度逻辑，包括员工必须遵守公司政策、员工在家中缺乏数字资源以及即使在紧急情况下，面对面客户交易的必要性也使他们不采用远程办公合法化。调查结果还表明，采用面对面工作与员工个人绩效呈负相关。

原创性/价值

目前的研究旨在对制度维护和制度工作的文献做出理论贡献，到目前为止，这些文献只关注制度变迁而不是制度维护。其次，很少有研究对合法性和效率之间的矛盾进行实证调查，尽管有关组织合法性的文献假设个人和组织并不总是理性的。