The affordances and constraints of video technology for leading remote work – Top managers’ perspective

Effective leadership in digitalized contexts is a necessity for business survival today and in the future. When leading remote workers, leaders need to increasingly rely on digital communication tools, such as video technology. Video technology provides affordances for users, and it is important to investigate how media affordances enhance or hinder leading remote work. Despite the popularity of affordances theory in organizational research context, its potential has not yet been fully used in leadership and management research. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate how top managers perceive affordances of video technology for leading remote work. Following constructivist grounded theory methodology we collected data from 33 top managers in IT-industry. The Gioia analysis process had three phases: initial coding, focused coding and theoretical coding. The findings indicate that video helps leading remotely working people, as it offers affordances such as flexibility, social connectedness, employee engagement, sharing information, and equality between people. However, using video technology for this purpose also presents constraints. The study identified the following tensions related to using video for leading remote workers: flexibility–inflexibility, social connectedness–social disconnectedness, engagement–disengagement, information sharing–information concealment, and equality–inequality. Our theoretical contributions relate to affordance theory and the theory of dialectical tensions. As managerial implications, we introduce tension management strategies for managers who use video technology in their work.