The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many global companies to adopt remote work experiments on a scale never. Although remote working in multinational companies is not a new work model, most business firms indefinitely shuttered their offices, instructing employees to work from home to curb the spread of the virus. At first, many international businesses hoped to resume normalcy after a couple of months, but millions of workers are still working remotely years later (Espitia et al., 2021). This workforce shift has increased the need for remote leaders to steer the organization’s objectives and goals. Organizational leadership has been the backbone and key to the success of firms in addressing challenges and concerns for the company. Therefore, the impact of remote leaders and their popularity is an essential area that needs research aligned with the effects of the pandemic.
Statement of the Problem
Building a successful team of leaders that share vision and enthusiasm for a business is quite challenging to most firms. The task can be more difficult when the unit is remote because it is demanding. COVID-19 has impacted various aspects of human life by making the boundary between work and personal life blurred. For firms to succeed and remain competitive when employees work from home, well-equipped remote leadership is critical (Contreras et al., 2020). Therefore, there is a need to study the impact of remote leaders on the success of global companies.
Research Objectives
- Establish how remote leadership affects the success and operation of the organization.
- Explore the growing popularity of remote leadership and its importance to global firms.
- Examine the challenges and concerns that affect remote leaders in multination organizations
Research Questions
To calculate such qualitative characteristics, quantitative indicators are needed. In this situation, they can be the relative value of the number of employees remotely, relative to the total number of employees, and financial indicators of liquidity, the company’s profitability: revenue, gross profit, net profit, current ratio, long-term assets/liabilities ratio. The full set of these metrics can help give a complete picture of a company’s ability to meet its short-term obligations, maintain revenue growth and related profits, and the effect on long-term assets and liabilities with a certain percentage of remote employees. The study will seek to answer the following questions:
- How do remote leaders positively impact the operations of a company?
- How can multinational business entities develop a successful remote leadership team?
- What effect does the remote workforce have on global companies?
The hypothesis is as follows: the number of remote workers affects the financial and organizational performance of the company, taken as a reflection of its effectiveness.
Scope of the Study
This study focuses on the impact of remote leadership on international organization success and its growing popularity in the 21st century. The scope will entail information on developing a solid remote leadership team and the impact of remote employees. This research will incorporate the existing literature on how remote working impacts the growth and success of multinational companies. Finally, this study will examine how remote working has helped firms respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and curb its spread.
Literature Review
Prevalence and popularity
This review aims to view trends in global workforce evolution over the years. The remote workforce has been documented and their positive impacts on the organization. Remote leaders help develop a formidable team away from the physical office (Kniffin et al., 2021). After the coronavirus outbreak, many companies were forced to adopt the remote work policy to curb its spread. This led to telecommuting gaining more popularity, with more workers reporting from home. Recent literature discussed remote working because of the forced lockdowns and restrictions imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mass shift to telecommuting has led to discovering the benefits of remote working.
Effective Organization Strategies
Building trust between remote leaders and employees is essential in determining the effectiveness of telecommuting arrangements and the business’s success. This entirely depends on the type of work, the persons involved, and the level of organization. Employees with unsupportive and non-flexible remote supervisors remain unproductive because of less guidance (Golden and Gajendran, 2019). Working from home comes with more challenges, and one can be burdened if work is not usefully managed. Research has suggested balancing work and personal life by creating flexibility among the staff. There is a need to ensure a supportive environment to bridge the office and the invisible colleagues. Setting up regular meetings and scheduled face-to-face meetings are essential in engaging the staff entirely away from the physical office (Contreras et al., 2020). To facilitate the gap between office and home, remote leaders need to ensure teams do not feel burdened with responsibilities and workload by offering a beneficial work arrangement.
Qualities and Roles of Remote Leaders
The purpose of remote leaders is to help the organization identify worthless goals and devise the best ways to achieve such objectives. Since they work away from the physical office, providing direction and motivation to the remote team is essential towards attaining the agreed goals. Remote leaders must understand the system’s value in which various work and situations arise from the members. Leading an invisible team requires someone who can comprehend demanding conditions and be objective to examine issues rationally and impersonally before making decisions (Wang et al., 2020). In addition, remote leaders must have the ability to discover the realities of one working environment and master the perceptive. The success of global remote leaders lies in the ability to establish proper priorities and relate well with other teams, especially when the work is done through subordinates. Another essential quality of remote leaders is communicating effectively and strategically planning to get more efficient and profitable systems (Spagnoli et al., 2020). This is important to discuss when examining the impact of remote leaders on the company’s success.
Relationship Between Remote Leadership and Organization Performance
There is a considerable impact of remote leaders on the success of international organizations. They are known to influence the company’s culture that impacts the whole performance of the business entity. Remote leaders focus on developing the company’s value and functioning as a vital bridge between the remote team and management (Solberg et al., 2020). During the modern business era of stiff competition, leaders must be differentiated to interest the employees working away from their physical offices. Remote leadership impacts the company by developing vision and other remote workforce expected to follow with innovation and creativity that yields more success.
Remote leadership also negatively impacts the performance of the organization. This is because it is hard to induce employees to perform better and stimulate change in turnover intention in the remote workforce. This type of leadership is beneficial for the short term and small projects because they do not lead to employee development that would bring the best out of their potential (Fletcher and Griffiths, 2020). Future research should be developed to determine the impact of remote leaders in developing employees working from home and the organizational performance in the conditions of modern technologies. Remote work is not a completely new mode for many industries, but in the current situation, remote mode is also typical for employee training and for many applied aspects of industries that are typical only for the 21st century: such as IT technology, journalism, education, and medicine (Sinclair et al., 2021). A company’s success is directly associated with leading and having close relationships (Lartey & Randall, 2021). Remote leaders offer opportunities for employees working remotely to grow and have a sense of belonging that allows them to participate in the company’s decision-making freely.
Digital Transformations
Numerous studies have analyzed digital transformation, the relationship between workers, and technological advances, in the form of concepts, as well as analysis of the effectiveness of employees in various leadership models in the context of digital transformation: most of these studies were theoretical in nature, and the experiments were aimed at fairly narrow research questions (Kozanoglu & Abedin, 2020; Cetindamar et al., 2021; Weber et al., 2022). Solberg et al. (2020) explore the digital mindset of workers and the impact remote leaders have in leveraging beliefs towards digital transformation within the organization. Leaders can break or make an organization depending on the approach they use. This is because digital transformations can create a competitive advantage and a sustainable economic accomplishment (Bilan et al., 2020). Remote leaders should use changes in technology as a catalyst towards achieving the company’s objective during this time of telecommuting.
Conceptual Framework
Concept of a Remote leadership
The proposed study supports the hypothesis, stated in Research Questions section, that remote working in the modern era of the connected world affects global companies’ success, operation, and future. According to health guidelines, the new ways of life brought by the pandemic restrictions shape business methods. The remote workforce is a complex process that requires extensive training and coordination to yield positive results. Working away from the office has been a familiar route since the pandemic. This has necessitated the formulation of a robust remote workforce committed to achieving desired results for the firms. The experience of workers outside the traditional office must be functional for an effective force and improvement of work engagement. There are essential behaviors from remote leaders that have a high-quality impact on the organization’s success. Such behavior roles influence the relationship between employees and their leaders like the social roles (Golden and Gajendran, 2018). They function as facilitators and mentors between the management team and remote workers. Human relation and goal pursuit roles are significant in achieving success in global organizations for remote leaders
Interaction and Isolation
Remote leaders must be flexible because telework significantly affects interactions among staff. The newly imposed work arrangements influence the organization’s psychosocial work characteristics, forcing remote leadership to take charge. As remote leaders are executing their duties at the comfort of their homes, it is hard to experience social interactions among co-workers, which involve ideas and strategies to lead the company effectively (Contreras et al., 2020). There is increased pressure from regulations and guidelines set by organizations like the Ministry of Health towards curbing the spread of the virus that adversely affect the ability to interact
Organization Performance
Performance is the individual achievement after exerting effort in a specific type of work. In a global business setup, performance is a unique phenomenon influenced by various variables such as environmental factors, ability to work, and employee motivation. Therefore, the organization’s performance heavily depends on individual work from remote leaders to effectively impact and bring change across their teams. The performance and achievement of international companies directly suffer in direct proportion when remote leaders do not have practical personal contributions (Chatterjee et al., 2022). Organizational achievement builds inspiration and empowerment to the subordinates working remotely, resulting in an exceptional effort, commitment, and willingness to take the task.
With the modernization of technology and software applications, remote leaders have an abundance of technology at their disposal to help them make effective decisions. They have the power to impact their performance through Zoom, Skype, and Google meetings to their teams. Although there is limited knowledge about technology across team members, remote leaders should adopt the right leadership path to bring the best from the remote staff and affect the worker’s attitude towards duties. Many global organization leaders lack the knowledge and preparation for such sudden and devastating events that lead to a rough time leading the company towards the efficient direction (Uhl‐Bien, 2021). In addition, the tough spot to get all their teams on the same track is a significant challenge for remote leaders towards achieving great participation.
Concept of Organizational Work Environment
A considerable number of studies have explained the concept of different work environments and concepts. The work environment is an essential factor in employees’ productivity, which leads to increased yield and success of the firm. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the increasing needs of varied work environments and provide employees with good working areas committed to its objectives (Galanti et al., 2021). The work environment is concerned with the conditions and wellness of the employees in achieving distinct duties. This study will analyze data from various pieces of literature to determine the importance and how the work environment affects the firm’s success.
Theoretical Framework
Managing remote teams has many challenges because of the physical separation among the members. GRPI model explains main organizational aspects of adaptation to remote work (Burke, 2021). In addition, the success of a remote workforce depends on individual members and their needs. The Tuckman Team Model will engage the team to properly organize its working process (Mellenthin et al., 2021). Remote leaders do not report to the office each day, and there is disconnection and lack of appropriate balancing between work and personal life. Therefore, DISC Model plays an essential role in managing conflicts within the collective, as they have special nature associated with the personality of the worker (Dyer & Shepherd, 2021).
GRPI Model
A new environment for most workers almost always takes time to adapt. In order to reduce this period, it is proposed to introduce a GRPI model, with the help of which managers must think over the roles of each participant in advance, establish rules for interaction in new conditions and, finally, adapt the goals, mission and vision of the company to new conditions (Bruke, 2021). The success of the organizational process of implementing this model will be crucial in terms of employee satisfaction, their efficiency and improvement of the company’s financial performance.
The Tuckman Team Model
The Tuckman team model makes it possible to structure teamwork in a remote work mode by breaking it down into stages. In addition, the effectiveness of such models in the context of cultural and racial diversity among workers has already been proven (Mellenthin et al., 2021). Each stage, from ideation to execution, although initially linear in structure, allows for return to different stages, which gives the team flexibility. With the help of various software, you can visualize these stages for more organized work of employees in a team remotely from each other.
DISC Model
This model allows managing conflicts in conditions of diversity and inclusiveness. With the help of the lower part of the circle of the S and C model, the balance of values on which professional and personal relationships are built between employees is determined. D and I, in turn, regulate the vectors of business processes, which should also be aimed not only at the result, but also at people. In a remote work environment, conflict management becomes more challenging, as they can be hidden from management (Dyer & Shepherd, 2021). In this regard, it is necessary to take proactive measures to prevent discord in the team.
Methodology
The study will gather information through quantitative research. This type of research method is straightforward and will give a brief analysis and review of data within the set time for this research. Questionnaires and their statistical processing will be used as the first technique. The second methodology will determine the relative size of remote workers in a number of companies, with a possible weighted vote depending on the industry: offline retail, for example, cannot maintain a number of remote employees in principle. The third technique will include an analysis of the financial performance of a given company in relation to the number of remote workers, for which regression analysis will be used to find a correlation between these variables.
Twenty-five questionnaires will be self-administered to various business organizations to study the selected area. HR and the available management team will help respond to the questions online related to work for leadership and managing a remote workforce, as it is a common research method in organizations (Flores, 2019). Every section of the questionnaire will have a sampled overview and consist of various personal and work data categories. The Likert scale will be used 1-strongly disagree, 2-disagree, 3-moderate,4- agree, 5-strongly agree. The data collected will be analyzed using statical packages such as SPSS.
Foreseen Limitations
This research is limited to the relationship between remote leadership and organizational performance. It does not consider other global organization factors such as economy and culture. This determines the authenticity of the findings because all aspects of multinational companies’ success are not considered. This study focuses on the global organization time scale during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the long-term impact requires in-depth research. The recent implication of the virus is a massive limitation on the approach to data collection and the contact to companies related to the study.
Research Schedule/ Timeline
References
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