Legitimacy versus efficiency: implementation of in-person work in Japanese companies during the COVID-19 pandemic
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Citation
Hara, Y. and Iwashita, H. (2023), "Legitimacy versus efficiency: implementation of in-person work in Japanese companies during the COVID-19 pandemic", Journal of Asia Business Studies, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JABS-03-2022-0095
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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