Working-from-home arrangements have become increasingly important for firms’ work organization. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to teams that previously did not work virtually being forced to interact and communicate virtually. In this study, we analyze changes in intra-team communication of four teams in a German medium-sized enterprise. Quantitative network analyses of email communication and qualitative analyses of interviews before and during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 show that flat hierarchies and self-managing processes helped team members to mitigate negative effects due to spatial and temporal dispersion in forced working-from-home arrangements. Moreover, analysis of the teams’ communication networks shows that forced remote work can trigger faultlines to become salient but that team cohesion, identification with the team, and individuals taking on broker roles prevent negative effects of faultlines on team performance. In discussing these findings, our study contributes to the research on coordination and communication in virtual teams by analyzing contextual, organizational, team-related as well as individual factors that explain how and why teams differ in successfully implementing working-from-home arrangements.

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Changes in organizational structure affect the intra-organizational communication network. However, despite an increasing relevance of less hierarchical and less bureaucratic forms of organizing, the question of how self-managing forms of organization influence employees’ communication behavior has received only scant attention yet. In our study, we analyze the case of a medium-sized firm that experiences organizational change from rigid bureaucratic structures to a more self-managing organization model and question how employees’ centrality in the communication network is affected by this reorganization. Following an explorative research approach informed by prior research on self-managing forms of organizations and communication networks, our findings show that after the change process communication generally is less dependent on formal hierarchy. However, while employees who held a higher rank before the change process loose in centrality, their centrality at the end of the change process is still higher than that of other employees. Moreover, employees who experience a promotion become more central in the communication network while demotions do not have an effect. By discussing these findings in the context of organizational change and the persistence of organizational structures, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the implementation process of self-managing organizations.