No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Distributed work is ubiquitous in modern organizations, as are situations where managers and workers interact remotely. Past research postulates the existence of costs of manager–worker separation, but empirical evidence is scant and inconclusive. Building on the literature on manager–worker separation and distributed work we claim that the effect of manager–worker separation on worker performance varies depending on three factors: task complexity, collocation of the worker with experienced peers, and manager supervisory experience. We investigate our arguments by developing hypotheses in the context of a multisite IT services organization, where we collected data encompassing 13,435 software maintenance tasks executed within a two years period. We find that the hypothesized interaction effects are significant and can give rise to costs of manager–worker separation. However, our results also pinpoint the existence of situations where benefits of manager–worker separation are present, that is, where remote supervision leads to superior worker performance. In practice, our findings suggest that organizations should consider task, work configuration, and manager characteristics when deciding whether workers and managers should be collocated.

Research summary We examine the advancement of women in executive roles in the ranks of the 10 highest executive positions in the Fortune 100 companies in 2001 and 2011. We find that women executives secured top executive positions faster than men, controlling for relevant individual attributes, and that the advantage of women with respect to men grew with the number of years they spent in the organization. The female advantage disappeared once companies had more than one high‐ranking female executive. We make use of several tests to assess possible unobserved differences between men and women executives, including the case–control technique from epidemiology. Our results are consistent with institutional pressures accelerating women's advancement to top executive positions, but they also reveal the limited effectiveness of such pressures. Managerial summary Employers interested in increasing the diversity of their executive ranks should pay attention not only to who is in those jobs but also how long it took them to get there. In our study, women in top jobs got there faster not just because they were better but because they moved through previous positions faster and skipped steps in job ladders. This suggests how diversity at the top can be enhanced without having to wait for more diverse cohorts in lower‐level jobs to slowly advance. The fact that faster advancement slowed once there were a few women in top jobs suggests that support for advancement was indeed a company choice, unfortunately one driven by public appearances.