Virtual Management and the New

Normal: New Perspectives on HRM and

Leadership since the Covid-19
Pandemic Svein Bergum
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Edited by
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Virtual Management
and the New Normal
New Perspectives on
HRM and Leadership
since the COVID-19
Pandemic
 Virtual Management and the New Normal

“This is a timely and important book since responses to Covid-19 marked a

juncture in how human resources are managed, particularly where work is done.
It brings together an impressive set of contributions offering insights from
research conducted in public and private sector organisations across a number of
European countries. Its focus on what can be learned from experiences of remote
working during this time and resulting implications for future ways of working
in a post-lockdown world, means that it represents an invaluable resource for
researchers, policy makers and managers as organisations adjust to a new
normal.”
—Clare Kelliher, Professor of Work and Organisation, Cranfield School
of Management, Cranfield University, UK

“When the idea of ‘telecommuting’ was introduced 50 years ago, the notion that
people should be allowed and enabled to work remotely instead of travelling to
a traditional office seemed both obvious and far-fetched, as veteran telework
guru Jack Nilles outlines in his foreword to this excellent edited volume. Despite
tremendous advances in technology and work organisation, the fundamental
challenges surrounding remote working have hardly changed. What has changed,
however, is the wealth of knowledge that is now available to deal with these to
make virtual management both effective and beneficial for all, which is sum-
marized in this outstanding book.”
—Karsten Gareis, Senior Project Manager and Researcher,
empirica GmbH, Bonn, Germany
 Svein Bergum • Pascale Peters
Tone Vold
Editors

Virtual Management
and the New Normal
New Perspectives on HRM and
Leadership since the COVID-19
Pandemic
Editors
Svein Bergum Pascale Peters
Inland Norway University of Applied Inland Norway University of
Sciences Applied Sciences
Lillehammer, Norway Breukelen, Norway

Tone Vold
Inland Norway University of Applied
Sciences
Rena, Norway

ISBN 978-3-031-06812-6    ISBN 978-3-031-06813-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06813-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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 Foreword

Jack M. Nilles, “the Father of Telecommuting”

Evolving Telework
The Beginning

In the 1960s and early 1970s—those were my rocket scientist days—I

often wondered how the technology we used for space could be applied
to real-world situations. As part of my search in 1971 I came across a
regional planner who said to me, “If you people can put a man on the
moon, then why can’t you do something about traffic? Why can’t you just
keep people off the freeways?” It was a revelation to me. Why not indeed?
I started to examine the problem from the first principles. Why do we
have traffic, particularly rush-hour traffic? It turned out that a large pro-
portion of rush-hour traffic comprises people driving to or from their
homes and their workplaces. What do they do when they get to their
workplaces? A little research showed that almost half of them were work-
ing in offices. What do they do when they get to their offices? A substan-
tial amount of their time, at least in 1971, was spent on the phone talking
to someone somewhere else.

v
vi Foreword

If that is the case, I thought, then why can they not just phone from
home and save the trips, not to mention gas costs, energy waste, air pol-
lution, and depreciation to their cars?
I happened to be the secretary of my aerospace engineering company’s
research committee at that time. I asked the committee members to
spend some effort and funds on the idea of substituting telecommunica-
tions (the telephone) for transportation (the freeways). They asked me
what I would need to do to conduct the research. I said that we would
probably need to hire a psychologist or two and maybe an economist—
we already had many engineers—to examine the implications of this
rearrangement of work. Their response was disappointing. “We are an
engineering company. We don’t want to deal with this touchy-feely stuff.”
I could not convince them otherwise.
I was complaining about this reaction to a friend of mine who taught
in the School of Engineering at the University of Southern California
(USC). I told him that USC had the right kind of people to do this
research, whereas my engineering company did not. Shortly thereafter, I
repeated my assessment to the Executive Vice President of the university.
He asked, “Why don’t you do it here?” So, I left the engineering company
and went to USC to become its first director of Interdisciplinary Program
Development. My job was to develop and manage research programmes
that involved multiple schools of the university.
As part of that job, I applied to the National Science Foundation for a
grant entitled, Development of Policy on the Telecommunications-­
Transportation Tradeoff. I got the grant and my chance to test my ideas in
the real world. My team, comprising university faculty from the Schools
of Engineering, Communication, and Business, enlisted the support of a
major national insurance company. The insurance company’s motivation
had nothing to do with our attempt to test our theory. Their objective
was simply to reduce the rate at which employees left the company. They
were willing to try distributing their workers into satellite offices near
where they lived, instead of requiring them to come into the company’s
downtown offices every day.
In the test project, the output of the employees’ work in the satellite
offices was transmitted to in-office minicomputer concentrators. The
minicomputers uploaded each day’s work to the company’s mainframes
 Foreword vii

every night. The project ran from 1973 through 1974, and was a resound-
ing success. Worker productivity and job satisfaction increased, along
with other positive indicators, and none of the employees involved in the
project left. We estimated that the company could save several million
(1973) dollars annually by broadly adopting our design.
Early in the project, I decided to call the process telecommuting or tele-
working, depending on the audience, to make it more understandable to
people than the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff. A book based
on the project was published in 1976 in the US and 1977 in Japan.
To my dismay, the project did not continue. The company manage-
ment was concerned that, if their workforce continued to be scattered
around the region, it would be too easy for them to be unionized. A few
months later, I spoke with a planner for the AFL/CIO about our research.
He also said that telecommuting was a terrible idea. Why? Because, if the
workers were scattered all over the region, how could they be organized
by the union? Both rejected telecommuting, though for completely
opposite reasons. I was getting the idea that telecommuting might be a
bit too radical for both groups, as fear of change seemed to be an issue.

The Middle

Then there began a series of requests for research funding, trials, and
demonstrations of telecommuting in the real world. In the 1980s, we
enlisted the support of a number of Fortune 100 companies, many of
which adopted telecommuting for their own employees. While giving us
data on how well telecommuting was working in large US corporations,
those projects produced another problem. Like the initial project with
the insurance company, we were not allowed to divulge the names of our
participants. Therefore, when executives of prospective telecommuting-­
adoptive companies asked who else was doing this, all we could say was
“Fortune 100 companies.”
In the meantime, the technology of the telecommunications infra-
structure was rapidly improving. In 1973, the option for telecommuting
from home was out of the question since the telephone system could not
provide the necessary transmission bandwidths at a reasonable price.
viii Foreword

With the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, the technology landscape

suddenly grew brighter for home-based telecommuting. The PC pro-
vided the office at home, thereby reducing the need for always-on con-
nectivity, while faster modems allowed ever easier communications to the
traditional office.
Yet, we still had the same fundamental problem in expanding the use of
telecommuting. We quickly learned that enlisting potential telecommuters
was no problem. However, attracting their management, particularly mid-
dle managers, was another issue altogether since we could not point to
specific companies to say, “The Xers have adopted telecommuting and are
enthusiastic about it.” We would point out telecommuting’s improvements
in productivity reduced the use of sick leave, reduced turnover, and dimin-
ished facilities costs for very little in up-front investment. The response was
often, “It may work for X, but it won’t work for us.” The idea that managers
might not be able to check on their employees’ progress was a clear issue.
“How do I know they’re working if I can’t see them?” [Yet, once that reluc-
tance was overcome, and the managers were trained to think about perfor-
mance differently, telecommuting generally became a great success.]
Frustrated by all this reluctance, we tried another tack by going to
government agencies. With governments involved in telecommuting, we
could run the demonstration projects and release the data publicly. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, we and others had successful projects with
state and municipal governments. After these projects, several people
have learned to design and run successful telework projects, both in
industry and in government. We knew how to manage them successfully
and developed the tools. I even wrote some books on the details; fore-
most among them is Managing Telework: Strategies for Managing the
Virtual Workforce. My wife Laila and I spent a considerable amount of
time in Europe, under the auspices of the European Commission, and in
Asia in the 1990s giving presentations about telework.
Yet, as the saying goes, the other shoe did not drop. Many managers
were still reluctant to take a chance on telecommuting for the reason
already stated. After all, what you knew now may be troublesome, but
something new might be worse. Risk aversion was endemic, except in
many small- to medium-sized start-ups that got the message beginning in
the 1980s. Even IBM and Yahoo gave up telework in the twentieth
 Foreword ix

century, largely because of management errors for which telecommuting

was blamed (in my opinion).
So, what could be the secret sauce that would grab the attention of
CEOs everywhere? What is the sauce that would break their reluctance
to change?

The Dawn, Among Other Things, Breaks

The secret sauce is a microscopic virus called COVID-19. Essentially
overnight, the world learned how important it is to keep people isolated
from each other in order to avoid becoming infected with a severe, often
fatal, disease. For roughly half the workforce in developed countries, tele-
work, alias remote work, became the key to survival.
Even so, my first thought in March 2020 focused on all those millions
of people, managers and teleworkers alike, who were thrust into tele-
working without a clue as to how to do it. For many, it was a formidable
struggle, though for long-time teleworkers it was business as usual. Those
who adapted quickly learned to manage by results, not by visual observa-
tion. Now that effective vaccines have arrived, the panic has abated. So,
are we about to go back to business as it was before 2020?
I think not. Evidence is growing daily that a substantial number of
these newly bred teleworkers like it just fine, and do not want to go back
to that pre-2020 office environment—at least not full time. The new
“normal” is becoming a hybrid; a mixture of home-based and office-based
work, with the average about half time in each location. The office work-
space of the future also is a different concept than yesterday’s cacopho-
nous, dysfunctional rows of cubicles. It is morphing into a centre for
comfortable face-to-face communication, both formal and informal.
Much of the sensitive interpersonal communication is performed in the
office; the detailed, focused work is done at, or near, home.
The successful management of the future is not necessarily what you
are used to. But you may enjoy it more.

Los Angeles, CA, USA Jack M. Nilles

June 2021
 Preface

Since the 1970s, when the American engineer Jack Nilles coined the term
telecommuting, scholars like us have been interested in innovative ways
of working in which people can work away from their employer or prin-
ciple, enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT),
meanwhile reducing commuting time, and, hence, contributing to “a
good cause.” Since that time, expectations about the possibilities for
remote working, for example working from home, have been high. In
contrast to the dystopian views on alienation due to the lack of physical
human contact being replaced by machine-mediated connectivity, as pic-
tured in the short story “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster (1909),
futurologists, such as the American Alvin Toffler, known for his book
“The Third Wave” (1980), predicted that technology and new social
structures would drastically change our everyday lives. According to
Toffler, in the short-term, administrative staff would only travel to work
in Japan because the collectivist culture would not fit with working from
home. In the rest of the world, the work was expected “to come” to the
administrative staff, living in their home-centred societies, providing
opportunities for new forms of entrepreneurship. Due to the rise of work-
ing from home in “electronic cottages,” central offices would no longer
be needed.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a huge interest for telecom-
muting and telework, as an innovative means to decentralize work, and
xi
xii Preface

stimulate regional development. Concepts such as telework centres and

satellite offices were launched as alternatives to the home office. Then,
people could work closer to home, but share technology and maintain
social contact, which were seen as problems of individual work at home.
In the late 1990s and early 2000, the diffusion of mobile communication
and internet made work even more independent of time and space, and
concepts such as mobile telework and multi-locational work received
growing interest.
Despite high expectations and forecasts, in practice, changes in the
traditional way of working did not go as fast as expected. Many articles
about working from home, or remote working in general, including ours,
started by noticing that IT-mediated working was not as big a trend as
thought. Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands were runners in
front, partly because of their individualistic national cultures, advanced
infrastructure, trust-based leadership, and independent employees.
However, in those countries too, the number of home workers only rose
slightly over the past decades, and remained a privilege for some groups,
such as highly educated workers in knowledge-intensive industries.
Obviously, most organizations, managers, and people stuck to old rou-
tines; there was no urgent need to change the traditional way of working
and, in many cases, a loss of communication, control, coordination,
cooperation, cohesion, co-learning, commitment, coaching, and career
progress, to name some well-reported issues, were feared.
About 50 years after Nilles’ first experiments with telecommuting,
however, the tremendous health risks of the COVID-19 virus caused a
great breakthrough of working from home. Never had workers around
the globe worked from home on such a large scale, so intensively, so
inclusively, as during the lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since
March 2020, previous discussions on the pros and cons of remote work-
ing, for employers, employees, their families, communities, and custom-
ers, and the way remote work and collaboration can be managed have
been rekindled.
This book is aimed at both scholars and practitioners who are inter-
ested in “where remote working is going after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
To further stimulate the scientific and societal conversations, and to
explore possible directions, the authors of the chapters of this book
 Preface xiii

present novel insights based on sound scholarly research. All of them

reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions in “the
world of work” in their particular contexts and the (potential) conse-
quences for organizations, employment relationships, HRM, leadership,
and people, both at the time of the pandemic and beyond. The general
belief is that governments and businesses will continue to focus on (part-­
time) remote working as the “new normal.” Although some contours of
the “new normal” may be visible, the question remains: Will the “new
normal” be a utopian or a dystopian, or perhaps both? The answer to this
question for a large part depends on human decision-making.
One of the triggers of the 1970s experiments with telecommuting was
the Yom Kippur War in the Middle-East, which led to scarcity of oil. In
the last stage of this volume being published, a new war has again affected
the oil prices (amongst other things) to a near staggering double over a
short period of time and is predicted to rise to the double of this within
a short period of time. Will this, combined with our experiences from the
COVID-19 pandemic, prepare for new remote working experiences? As
the cost of electricity in Europe has also risen dramatically, the cost of
commuting may influence on the number of employees choosing to work
from home, where this is provided as an option. Hopefully, this book will
be able to contribute towards insights for making decisions for the “new
normal.”
We sincerely hope that society has learned from the COVID-19 pan-
demic and that these insights provide “a window of opportunity” to real-
ize multiple values that can be strived for by adopting remote working.
Based on the insights from the chapters in this book, we can conclude in
any case that for the “new normal” to be sustainable, we need to consider
multiple societal, organizational, and individual values. In view of poten-
tial paradoxical tensions, we will argue that this demands a continuous
balancing act. Regarding “people,” we need to strive for health, safety,
work-family balance, and labour market and (gender) equalities, among
other values. Regarding “profit,” efficiency, innovation, and continuity
for organizations and people’s careers are important values. Regarding
“planet,” values such as environmental sustainability, diversity, and inclu-
siveness need to be considered.
xiv Preface

To conclude, we would like to thank all those who have contributed to

and supported the publication of this volume. First, we would like to
express our gratitude to all the authors for their cooperation and insight-
ful chapters. Second, we would like to thank the crew at Palgrave
Macmillan, Alec Selwyn, Mary Amala Divya Suresh, and Liz Barlow, for
their help throughout the project. Third, we would like to thank Jack
Nilles for his swift and valuable reply with a foreword to this manuscript.
Fourth, we would like to thank our universities, Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences in Norway and Nyenrode Business Universiteit, in
the Netherlands, for their support during the process. Last, but not least,
we are thankful for the warm support from our spouses Ingebjørg,
Hendrik, and Yngvar.

Lillehammer, Norway Svein Bergum

Geldermalsen, The Netherlands  Pascale Peters
Rena, Norway  Tone Vold
June 2022
 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1
Svein Bergum, Pascale Peters, and Tone Vold

Part I Reflections on Remote Working in the Past and Future

and the Impact on the Organizational Level: Remote
Working Pre-Pandemic and Post-Pandemic  15

2 Three
 Organizational Perspectives on the Adoption of
Telework 17
Tor Helge Pedersen and Svein Bergum

3 Shaping
 Hybrid Collaborating Organizations 39
Jeroen van der Velden and Frank Lekanne Deprez

4 Constructing
 New Organizational Identities in a Post-­
pandemic Return: Managerial Dilemmas in Balancing the
Spatial Redesign of Telework with Workplace Dynamics
and the External Imperative for Flexibility 59
Siri Yde Aksnes, Anders Underthun, and Per Bonde Hansen

xv
xvi Contents

5 How
 Working Remotely for an Indefinite Period Affects
Resilient Trust Between Manager and Employee 79
Marianne Alvestad Skogseth and Svein Bergum

6 Exploring
 Virtual Management and HRM in Thin
Organizational Places During the COVID-19 Pandemic 99
Mikael Ring

Part II Reflections on How to Manage Hybrid Working:

HRM and Leadership 119

7 
The Employment Relationship Amidst and Beyond the
COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of (Responsible)
Inclusive Leadership in Managing Psychological
Contracts121
Melanie De Ruiter and Rene Schalk

8 Human
 Resource Management in Times of the
Pandemic: Clustering HR Managers’ Use of
High-Performance Work Systems141
Ann-Kristina Løkke and Marie Freia Wunderlich

9 
Changes in Learning Tensions Among Geographically
Distributed HR Advisors During the COVID-19
Pandemic161
Svein Bergum and Ole Andreas Skogsrud Haukåsen

10 Old
 Normal, New Normal, or Renewed Normal: How
COVID-19 Changed Human Resource Development181
Eduardo Tomé and Diana Costa

11 How
 Can Organizations Improve Virtual Onboarding?
Key Learnings from the Pandemic203
Marcello Russo, Gabriele Morandin, and Claudia Manca
 Contents xvii

12 Onboarding
 and Socialization Under COVID-19 Crisis:
A Knowledge Management Perspective223
Hanne Haave, Aristidis Kaloudis, and Tone Vold

13 Leadership
 in Hybrid Workplaces: A Win-Win for
Work-­Innovation and Work-Family Balance Through
Work-­Related Flow?243
Robin Edelbroek, Martine Coun, Pascale Peters,
and Robert J. Blomme

Part III Reflections on Outcomes of Remote Working 267

14 Dual
 Role of Leadership in ‘Janus-Faced’ Telework
from Home269
Matti Vartiainen

15 Security
 Issues at the Time of the Pandemic and
Distance Work291
Reima Suomi and Brita Somerkoski

16 Eroding
 Boundaries and Creeping Control: “Digital
Regulation” as New Normal Work313
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre

17 COVID-19
 “Passports” and the Safe Return to Work:
Consideration for HR Professionals on How to
Navigate This New Responsibility333
Aizhan Tursunbayeva and Claudia Pagliari

18 P
 erceived Lockdown Intensity, Work-­Family Conflict
and Work Engagement: The Importance of Family
Supportive Supervisor Behaviour During the COVID-19
Crisis359
Marloes van Engen, Pascale Peters, and Frederike van de Water
xviii Contents

19 S
 ustainable Leadership and Work-­Nonwork Boundary
Management and in a Changing World of Work383
Christin Mellner

20 Epilogue:
 The Future of Work and How to Organize
and Manage It405
Svein Bergum, Pascale Peters, and Tone Vold

I ndex435
 Notes on Contributors

Siri Yde Aksnes studied social anthropology at the University of Oslo

and holds a PhD in Social Policies from Oslo Metropolitan University.
She is a senior researcher at the Work Research Institute, OsloMet. Her
main fields of interests range from welfare politics and labour market
inclusion to teleworking and the flexible working life.
Svein Bergum is Associate Professor of Organization and Management
at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (HINN), Faculty of
Economics and Social Science. He has been a visiting academic at the
New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program and has
been the leader of research projects financed by the Norwegian and
Swedish Research Council on remote leadership and the role of middle
managers in digital transformation.
Robert J. Blomme is Full Professor of Organization Behavior and Full
Professor Management and Organization at the Open University
Netherlands. Also, he is a visiting professor at a diversity of (inter)national.
Recipient of awards and research grants, he published peer-­reviewed arti-
cles in highly ranked journals, academic books, and book chapters.
Diana Costa is a PhD student in Management. Previously she did a
master’s in tourism and hotel management and a double degree in tour-

xix
xx Notes on Contributors

ism plus hotel management. All the courses happened at Universidade

Europeia, Lisbon.
Martine Coun (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Organisation Studies at
the Faculty of Management Sciences (Open University, Netherlands). In
her research she focusses on leadership behaviour in remote and hybrid
work contexts and the consequences for collaboration in organizations.
She published her work in, for example, European Management Journal,
Frontiers of Psychology, International Journal of Human Resource
Management, and Journal of Leadership Studies.
Melanie De Ruiter is Associate Professor of Work and Organizational
Psychology at Nyenrode Business University. Her research mainly focuses
on psychological contracts, leadership, motivation, and well-being. She is
associate editor of Human Resource Development Quarterly and serves on
the editorial review boards of Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and
Journal of Managerial Psychology.
Robin Edelbroek , MSc, holds a position as a part-time PhD candidate
at Nyenrode Business Universiteit, where he researches innovative work-­
behaviour in inter-organizational and hybrid (remote) working contexts.
He has co-authored and published several articles in international peer-­
reviewed journals such as Journal of General Management and Frontiers in
Psychology.
Hanne Haave is a researcher and lecturer at the Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences, Inland School of Business and Social Sciences, having
lectured quantitative and qualitative data collection methods for several
years. Besides being a project manager in several large research projects,
she has been conducting important gender research. She is doing research
into student active methods and game-based learning.
Per Bonde Hansen is a senior researcher at the Work Research Institute,
Oslo Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in History from the
University of Oslo. Main research interests include industrial relations,
(non-)standard employment, and labour history.
Ole Andreas Haukåsen is a PhD candidate in Innovation and Services
in Public and Private Sector in Department of Economics and Social
 Notes on Contributors xxi

Sciences, Inland University of Applied Sciences, Norway. His PhD

focuses on innovation across distributed organizations.
Aristidis Kaloudis is Full Professor at The Norwegian University of
Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Industrial Economics
and Technology Management in Norway. His research interests are within
innovation policy, forecasting with AI, skills policy, and research policy.
He is a senior editor of the Springer publication Journal of the Knowledge
Economy, and has co-edited and contributed to several books, as well as
authored and co-authored numerous journal articles and reports.
Frank Lekanne Deprez supports (inter)national organizations to maxi-
mize human dividend by focusing on human contributions that have a
valuable and sustainable impact. He is partner of Better Organizations
and founder & owner of ZeroSpace Advies. From 2006 to 2021 he was
Assistant Professor of People Management and Organization Design at
Nyenrode Business University.
Ann-Kristina Løkke (PhD) is an associate professor at Aarhus
University. Her main research interests lie in the field of human resource
management and its impact on employee well-being and attendance
behaviour. She has published in journals such as The International Journal
of Human Resource Management, Public Management Review, and Review
of Public Personnel Administration.
Claudia Manca is an assistant professor at University of Bologna and
co-director of the Master of Studies in Human Resource and Organization
at Bologna Business School. Her research revolves around the latest
trends of injecting mobility and flexibility in the place of work, and how
these are affecting the way people create and navigate their social lives at
work and beyond.
Christin Mellner (PhD) is Researcher, and Senior Lecturer in Work-
and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology,
Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on new ways of
working practices, sustainable leadership, and the role of mindfulness-
and compassion-based interventions, as related to work-nonwork bound-
ary management, recovery, health, and work-life balance.
xxii Notes on Contributors

Gabriele Morandin is Professor of Leadership at the Department of

Management of the University of Bologna, Italy, where he is the Director
of the Bachelor in Business Administration. He has been Visiting Scholar
and Research Assistant at the University of Michigan, USA; he is Visiting
Professor at Kedge Business School, France, and Associate Dean at
Bologna Business School, Italy.
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre (PhD) is a management professor at the
University of Quebec at Montreal (ESG-UQAM), Canada. Her research
examines boundaries between work and life across different national con-
texts, with a focus on the regulation of digital technologies. She has
received the Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research and
co-chairs the Technology, Work and Family research community of the
Work and Family Researchers Network.
Claudia Pagliari is an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh,
UK, where she leads the interdisciplinary Global eHealth Research
Group. Her recent research includes aspects of COVID-19 technologies
and workforce informatics, as well as their ethical and governance impli-
cations. She is a co-founder and theme leader of the NHS Digital
Academy, an executive leadership initiative sponsored by the UK
Government. She also holds a number of external advisory roles and con-
sultancies, most recently with the World Health Organization, the
European Centres for Disease Control, the Scottish Government, and
various EU and international research agencies.
Tor Helge Pedersen is an associate professor at Inland Business School,
Inland Norway University College of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer,
Norway. He received his PhD in Political Science from University of
Tromsø in 2009. His main research areas are within public administra-
tion, organization, and innovation.
Pascale Peters is Full Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management
at Nyenrode Business Universiteit in the Netherlands. She is a member of
the editorial board of Tijdschrift voor Arbeidsvraagstukken and involved in
Holland Management Review. She publishes on topics including the con-
temporary and sustainable organization of work, sustainable HRM, work-
life balance, and boundary management. She is also a Visiting Professor at
the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway.
 Notes on Contributors xxiii

Mikael Ring (PhD) is Associate Professor of Human Geography at the

Department of Pedagogics and Special Education, Gothenburg University
Sweden. He has done a wide range of research within regional develop-
ment, organizational development and change, rural development, urban
planning, pedagogics, and disability.
Marcello Russo is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the
Department of Management of the University of Bologna, Italy, and
Director of the Global MBA at Bologna Business School. He is Visiting
Professor at Kedge Business School, France. His research revolves around
the management of the work-life interface and the onboarding of personnel.
René Schalk is associated with the departments of Human Resource
Studies and Tranzo of Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is extraor-
dinary professor at the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences
of North-West University, South Africa. His research interests cover
human resources, organization studies, social work, and well-being.
Marianne Alvestad Skogseth has been working with HR for 20 years.
Since 2008 she has been an HR-manager in the Oslo Municipality. She
has held HR-positions in many different Agencies and Districts. She leads
the HR-section in the Agency for Cultural Affairs. In 2021, she completed
her Master Degree in Public Administration at the Inland Norway
University of Applied Sciences. Her Master Thesis was about virtual man-
agement and whether it is possible to maintain trust at distance.
Brita Somerkoski works as senior research fellow in the Department of
Teacher Education, University of Turku, Finland. Brita’s current research
is about fire safety for early education-aged children as well as school
safety and security issues. Her other research areas are occupational safety,
COVID-19 epidemic and consequences, gamification, injuries, learning
outcomes, and curriculum research.
Reima Suomi is Professor of Information Systems Science at the
University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests focus on health-
care information systems and inter-organizational information systems,
eGovernment as well as on different governance structures for informa-
xxiv Notes on Contributors

tion systems management. For 20 years, he has headed the work on the
conference series Well-being in the Information Society (WIS).
Eduardo Tomé did his PhD in Economics in 2001 at the University of
Lisbon. Since then he lectured in a number of Portuguese Universities.
He has published, participated in conferences and organized conferences
in the area of intangibles, namely about Human Resource Development,
Knowledge Management, and Intellectual Capital.
Aizhan Tursunbayeva is an assistant professor at the University of
Naples Parthenope, Italy. Her previous professional roles include Assistant
Professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands, Management
Consultant at KPMG Advisory, Italy, and Manager at HSBC Bank
(Canada, UK, Poland, Kazakhstan). She teaches Organizational Design,
Human Resource Management (HRM), and People Analytics. Her
research lies at the intersection of HRM, technology, innovation, and
healthcare.
Anders Underthun is Research Professor of Economic Geography and
Working Life Studies at the Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan
University. He holds a PhD in Human Geography from The Norwegian
University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Underthun’s
research interests include atypical employment, flexible work arrange-
ments, and industrial relations.
Jeroen van der Velden is Associate Professor of Strategy and
Transformation and Director of the Centre for Strategy, Organisation
and Leadership at Nyenrode Business Universiteit. As a researcher and
advisor, he has been involved in the introduction of virtual teamworking
in multiple large International Corporations. His main interests are stra-
tegic and digital transformation and new ways of working.
Frederike van de Water (MSc) graduated on the topic Perceived
Lockdown Intensity and Work Engagement with an 8.4 average from
Nyenrode Business University, the Netherlands. During her Master in
Management she specialized in Global Strategy. She is a full-time consul-
tant where her passion lies by helping companies in redefining their cus-
 Notes on Contributors xxv

tomer relationship and thus leading companies to become more

client-centric organizations.
Marloes van Engen is Associate Professor in Strategic Human Resource
Management at the Institute for Management Research at Radboud
University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is also a member of Radboud’s
Work-Life consortium and of the Gender and Power in Management and
Politics hotspot. Her passion in teaching and research lies in understanding
and managing Diversity, Equality and Inclusion in Organizations, and in
sustainability in Work and Care. She is a multidisciplinary scholar using a
range of quantitative, qualitative, and action research methods. She has
published in the Academy of Management Annals, Psychological Bulletin,
Leadership Quarterly, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Career Development
International, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
International Journal of Human Research Management, and others.
Matti Vartiainen is Senior Advisor, Professor (emer.) of Work and
Organizational Psychology at the Department of Industrial Engineering
and Management, Aalto University School of Science. His research inter-
ests focus on psychological and social-psychological phenomena in orga-
nizational innovations, digital work, new ways of hybrid, remote, mobile
and multi-locational work, distributed virtual teams and organizations.
These phenomena are studies from the action regulation theory view-
point. In addition, the role of collaborative digital platforms supporting
knowledge building and future competencies is of interest.
Tone Vold lectures at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences,
Norway, in courses within digitalization of workforms and knowledge man-
agement, and is particularly interested in knowledge management, e-learn-
ing, and games for learning. Her PhD is about work relevance of higher
education for innovative and entrepreneurial behaviour in organizations.
Marie Freia Wunderlich (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus
University. Her research focuses mainly on the topics of Strategic Human
Resource Management, employee experiences, and well-being. She has
presented her work at international conferences such as the British
Academy of Management Conference or the International Conference of the
Dutch HRM Network.
 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Changes in knowledge flows between HR advisors because

of the pandemic 174
Fig. 18.1 Conceptual model 367

xxvii
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 The three theoretical perspectives and their assumptions 25

Table 3.1 Lessons learned from previous and current research on
collaborating teams, organizations, and ecosystems in
general and specifically during the stages “onsite” and
“full-remote” working during COVID-19 on performance,
involvement, and innovation at team, organization, and
ecosystem level 46
Table 4.1 List of organizations and their characteristics 66
Table 5.1 Description of the informants 84
Table 6.1 Interviewees 105
Table 8.1 Descriptive results for High-Performance Work System
items148
Table 8.2 HPWS practice utilization reported by HR managers
during the COVID-19 pandemic 150
Table 8.3 Characteristics of the two clusters 152
Table 10.1 Description on studies on work environment and the
COVID-19 pandemic 185
Table 10.2 Relevant content of the mentioned studies 186
Table 12.1 The different phases for the newcomer
(Filstad, 2016, p. 198) 227
Table 12.2 Overview of the use of the 4 C’s in different levels of
onboarding strategies—from Bauer (2010, p. 3)—reprinted
with permission from T. Bauer 228

xxix
xxx List of Tables

Table 12.3 The 4 C’s and KM—what is shared 229

Table 12.4 Overview of the informants 230
Table 12.5 Adapted from Bauer (2013), including type of onboarding:
digital or physical 238
Table 13.1 Descriptive overview of the sample 251
Table 13.2 Construct descriptive statistics 252
Table 13.3 Correlations second wave and the square root of the
Average Variance Extracted (in bold) 252
Table 13.4 Indirect effects 256
Table 14.1 Within category challenge and benefit ambivalences
(N = 228) in teleworkers’ experiences in WFH 279
Table 14.2 Challenges and benefits of WFH in teleworking leaders’
experiences280
Table 17.1 Issues to consider for HR professionals in relation to
COVID-19 vaccination certificatation mandates 340
Table 18.1 Means, standard deviations, correlations, and reliabilities
amongst variables 370
Table 18.2 Hierarchical regression analysis: work engagement 371
Table 18.3 Hierarchical regression analysis: work-family conflict 372
Table 18.4 Moderated mediation model 373
Table 18.5 Hierarchical regression analysis: engagement 374
 1
Introduction
Svein Bergum, Pascale Peters, and Tone Vold

The COVID-19 pandemic declared by the World Health Organization

March 2020, and the social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and self-­
imposed isolation that followed, can be characterized as both a health
crisis and a disruptive event that affected the ‘world of work’ and ‘the rest
of life’ in many areas, and perhaps irreversibly. The pandemic reinforced

S. Bergum (*)
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, Norway
e-mail: Svein.bergum@inn.no
P. Peters
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, Norway
Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands
e-mail: P.peters@nyenrode.nl
T. Vold
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Rena, Norway
e-mail: Tone.vold@inn.no

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

S. Bergum et al. (eds.), Virtual Management and the New Normal,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06813-3_1
2 S. Bergum et al.

trends that had been going on for several decades, including the flexibili-
zation of labor according to time and place, variously referred to as tele-
commuting, or “telework, remote work, distributed work, virtual work,
flexible work, flexplace, and distance work, among other labels” (Allen
et al., 2015, p. 42). Although these related terms each have slightly differ-
ent conceptualizations, in this chapter, we use the concept of remote
work, which refers to “any form of work not conducted in the central
office, including work at branch locations and differing business units
(Allen et al., 2015, pp. 43–44).”
Organizing work requires management. This, however, has been a
challenge not only during the pandemic, but also with remote work gen-
erally. Most of the literature on leadership and management is about
leading and managing employees that are at the office or other work-
places in close proximity to the management. However, during the pan-
demic, many employees were at their home offices, which requires a
somewhat different approach, also labeled virtual or e-leadership
(Das Gupta, 2011). In this book, the initiatives on both leadership and
management in the context of remote working during the COVID-19
pandemic are referred to as virtual management, which is reflected in the
title of this book.
To reduce the risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus, during the pan-
demic, face-to-face communication was limited as much as possible. To
continue their operations, many organizations introduced, scaled-up,
and/or intensified work-from-home practices, regardless of them or their
stakeholders having experience with remote working and how to manage
it. This type of remote working was particularly introduced for people in
so-called non-essential occupations who could use information and com-
munication technologies (ICT) to communicate with managers, col-
leagues, customers, and other stakeholders. Those in so-called essential
jobs that require physical presence due to the nature of the work activi-
ties, such as health care professionals, could not work remotely. Dingel
and Neiman (2020) estimated that particularly high-income economies
have a high share of jobs that can exclusively be done at home, which are
usually more-paying jobs.
Whereas in 2017, only 5% of the working population in Europe
worked from home on a regular basis and 10% only occasionally, in April
 1 Introduction 3

2020, 37% of the employed had started working from home due to the
pandemic, either exclusively or partially. This stepped up to 48% in July
2020 but decreased to 42% in February/March 2021 (Eurofound, 2020,
pp. 27–36). In line with the findings by Dingel and Neiman (2020), the
home-working figures differed widely across countries, depending on the
type of economy. For example, in the Netherlands, before the COVID-19
pandemic about one in three people worked from home at least occasion-
ally, of which about 6% of them did so (almost) exclusively. At the begin-
ning of the pandemic, about 45%–56% worked remotely, of which many
of them (almost) exclusively (Hamersma et al., 2020). Regarding the pro-
portion of people who worked from home during the first phase of the
COVID-19 pandemic exclusively, Eurofound (2020) estimated that this
ranged from around one-fifth of the workers in Croatia, Poland, Slovakia,
Bulgaria, and Hungary to more than 40% in France, Spain, Italy, and
Ireland. In Belgium, this proportion even was 50%. Conversely, whereas
less than 25% of the workers in Belgium and Spain worked from their
employer’s premises only, this was more than half of the workers in
Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia (Eurofound, 2020, p. 33).
Also, outside the European context, the proportion of people who
worked from home during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic
differed widely. In May 2020, almost half of the workers in the United
States worked from home (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020). In the UK, virtual
working reached 43.1% in April 2020 (Felstead & Reuschke, 2020). For
Japan, the Cabinet Office reported that the virtual work percentage was
34.5% at the end of May 2020 and Morikawa (2020) reported that
approximately 32% worked remotely in June 2020. Delaporte and Pena
(2020) wrote that in Latin American and Caribbean countries, the share
of individuals who worked from home in that period varied from 7% in
Guatemala to 16% in the Bahamas.
Strikingly, also in jobs and for activities that were previously not con-
sidered technological ‘teleworkable,’ many people could work remotely.
The focus on health risks associated with the COVID-19 virus, mean-
while enabling continuity of organizations’ operations, were weighed
more heavily than the reported ‘work-from-home risks’ around control,
coordination, cohesion, knowledge sharing, and work motivation as per-
ceived by managers. Managers’ perceptions and attitudes had been
4 S. Bergum et al.

hindering them to change organizational routines, hence the break-

through of remote working, since the 1970s (Illegems & Verbeke, 2004;
Peters & Batenburg, 2015; Peters et al., 2010). In fact, history shows the
uptake of remote work always to have been prompted by some sort of
crisis (Peters, 2020).
In response to the oil crises of 1973–1974, resulting from the Yom
Kippur War in the Middle East, and to traffic and environmental prob-
lems of that time, in 1973, engineer Jack Nilles (see the preface of this
book), who worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
in the United States of America, came up with the idea ‘to move work to
the people,’ rather than the other way around, which he coined ‘telecom-
muting’ (Allen et al., 2015; Nilles, 1998). These experiments were also
inspired by the alarming report The Limits to Growth (1972) that warned
for overconsumption. After a first phase of experimenting with isolated
projects and (governmental-supported) pilots, and following some early
telework adopters, such as IBM in 2018, depending on countries’ tech-
nological, labor-market, economic and ecological developments, organi-
zations had started to adopt remote working mainly as a strategy to save
overhead costs, deal with workforce issues, meet the demand of mainly
highly educated professionals for more job autonomy and flexibility, or,
often pressured by national policies, to support labor-market participa-
tion of people who are (partly) disabled for work (Allen et al., 2015).
After 2005, much inspired by the white paper entitled the ‘New World
of Work’ by Microsoft’s chief executive officer (CEO) Bill Gates (Gates,
2005), new concepts, broader than teleworking, attracted attention. The
volatile, uncertain, and complex and ambiguous markets called for new
organizational philosophies, cultures, and designs, referred to as ‘new
ways of working,’ that could increase work engagement and stimulate
knowledge sharing and open innovation. Under this credo, and enabled
by new information and communication technologies, organizations
implemented activity-based working, encouraging employees to ‘work
remotely’ and to proactively self-manage their work, and, thereby, to
come up with creative solutions to problems in the workplace to enhance
organizations’ resilience (Peters et al., 2014). Also, with the deployment
of so-called flexworkers and mostly ‘voluntary’ self-employed persons
without staff, the required labor flexibility of organizations was further
 1 Introduction 5

increased. Moreover, natural disasters, such as the earthquake and nuclear

disaster in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, forced organizations to adopt
working from home. In Japan, organizations invested in their ‘telework
infrastructure’ to be better prepared for new natural disasters and crises
(Deccan Herald, 2011), despite the cramped housing of the Japanese
population and the collectivist culture with long office days. In the years
of economic crisis and uncertainty, an increasing number of organiza-
tions in Western economies implemented some form of new ways of
working to reduce overhead costs or simply to mimic the new ways of
working.
Surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a large proportion of
remote workers, including those who were not used to working from
home before the COVID-19 pandemic, appeared to be very capable of
organizing their work themselves, taking responsibility together and
coming up with creative solutions and succeeded to maintain or even
enhance their productivity. Others, however, experienced a loss of pro-
ductivity and even financial security, job satisfaction, and well-being
(Lund et al., 2020), enhancing existing social inequalities (Spreitzer et al.,
2017). Also, many employees missed the direct contact with colleagues
and customers, and the spontaneous meetings at the office, where they
can also distance themselves physically, mentally, and behaviorally, affect-
ing their physical and mental health (Lund et al., 2020). Moreover,
research into the division of tasks and work-life balance, for example,
shows that the corona crisis may be experienced different for fathers and
mothers (Yerkes et al., 2020).
Early 2022, the rules around the COVID-19 pandemic were relaxed,
schools were re-opened, and people started to become mobile again. In
future phases of the pandemic, or perhaps, endemic, organizations need
to reflect, learn, and act. The ‘work-from-home risks’ that were taken for
granted at the beginning of the pandemic must be managed sustainably
(Peters, 2020). But how? Some organizations are thinking about how
working from home can further reduce travel costs and buildings and
track remote workers through employee surveillance technology and ana-
lyze their behaviors and productivity through big data. However, can
such ‘micromanagement’ motivate home workers? What are the physical
and mental health consequences of working from home under these
6 S. Bergum et al.

conditions? Are people sufficiently supported in their professional devel-

opment? Or is social inequality being further increased?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, all stakeholders had to give mean-
ing to the pandemic (together) and had to improvise, creating opportuni-
ties for learning and innovation. It can be argued that the crisis not only
offered threats but also opportunities to take new and hopefully more
sustainable paths. After all, the technical infrastructure that has been
built and strengthened over the past period, and that now makes working
from home possible, offers the possibilities to combine the multiple val-
ues that were intended with remote working in the past: people, profit, and
planet. This, however, requires organizations, governments, and individu-
als to seize the momentum to think now about the impact organizations
and their incumbents want to have and to adapt their strategies, policies,
practices, and leadership accordingly (cf. Contreras et al., 2020;
Peters, 2020).
So, what has been learned from the pandemic? What will be different
after the pandemic in terms of the organization of work in time and
space, employment relationships, human resource management (HRM)
(i.e., systems and processes), and leadership (i.e., personal and interper-
sonal dynamics) that guide, motivate, and provide opportunities to peo-
ple to perform? And how will that affect the behavior of and outcomes
for managers, employees, and other stakeholders? To answer these ques-
tions, it is timely to update our knowledge, as management and working
in times of the COVID-19 pandemic may be different, and perhaps dif-
ferently perceived compared to previous periods. This book, entitled
Virtual Management and the New Normal: New Perspectives on HRM and
Leadership Since the COVID-19 Pandemic aims to add new knowledge on
the debate on the management and consequences of (the future of )
remote working. The focus of the book is on how organizations, HRM,
leadership, leaders, and individual workers have been affected by remote
working during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the new experiences
with enhanced remote working and management can be applied in what
has been coined the “new normal.” The book presents theoretical chap-
ters, and quantitative and qualitative (longitudinal) studies, based on
data from organizations, managers, and employees in different, mainly
European countries, but also from Canada. With few exceptions,
 1 Introduction 7

previous studies have argued for general requirements for virtual leaders.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced managers to differentiate their
management style in relation to different people and different situations,
but how? And technology and digital services have never been used as
extensively in previous telework studies as during the COVID-19 pan-
demic. Our book, therefore, focusses on topics lacking in previous stud-
ies and will also contribute in view of the context of the COVID-19
pandemic mentioned earlier.
This book starts with a unique preface written by ‘the father of tele-
commuting’ Jack Nilles. He gives us his personal journey through the
history and evolution of telework, from the 1970s “Telecommunication-­
Transportation Trade-off” until todays telework related to the
COVID-19 pandemic. The remainder of the book is divided into three
thematic parts. The first part is called: “Reflections on Remote Working
in the Past and Future and the Impact on the Organizational Level:
Remote Working Pre-Pandemic and Post-Pandemic.” In this part the
focus is on organizational perspectives and the impact of the pandemic
on organizational culture, identity, collaboration and trust issues.
In Chap. 2, the Norwegian scholars Pedersen and Bergum discuss
three fruitful theories that can explain the past, current, and future adop-
tion of and changes related to remote working and leadership: the tech-
nological, the performance gap, and the institutional perspective.
Chapter 3, by the Dutch scholars Van der Velden and Lekanne Deprez,
discusses the future of remote working, refered to as ‘hybrid working.’
More specifically, the authors argue that hybrid collaboration requires a
multidisciplinary understanding and effort in which (top) management,
employees, and other internal and external stakeholders share knowledge,
interact, and work together to generate sustainable value. They describe
three stages: before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the lockdown, and
after the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, they discuss some dilemmas
and paradoxes that future hybrid organizations will encounter.
In Chap. 4, the Norwegian scholars Aksnes, Underthun, and Hansen
explore how managers at different levels of authority experience various
levels of organizational presence in a remote workspace, and the organi-
zational identity before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Their quali-
tative approach focussing on managers in 10 public and private
8 S. Bergum et al.

organizations in Norway has sought to unveil the impact that telework

has had on management approaches, the dynamics, and ‘sense of flux’ on
organizations.
In Chap. 5, the case study by Skogseth and Bergum, conducted in the
Department of Culture at the City of Oslo, builds on semistructured
interviews with managers and employees. More specifically, the authors
explore how trust, which depends on a close relationship between man-
ager and employee, can be maintained when going digital.
In Chap. 6, using a qualitative approach, Mikael Ring seeks to investi-
gate some of the sociospatial aspects of thickness and thinness in large
Swedish organizations as these arise from working from home during the
COVID-19 pandemic. He explores how the post-pandemic work can be
organized and how technology can aid in the process of creating ‘thick
places.’
The second part of the book is “Reflections on How to Manage Hybrid
Working: HRM and Leadership,” and is focused on leadership and HRM
issues in contexts where employees work both at the office and remotely.
In Chap. 7, building on a psychological contract lens and the concept
of inclusive leadership, the conceptual paper by the Dutch scholars De
Ruiter and Schalk discusses how employees experienced the employment
relationship and virtual leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, and
how those experiences shape mutual obligations between employees and
their organizations beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing on
challenges regarding distrust, micromanaging, and generational differ-
ences, the authors forecast that safe working environments and inclusion
and diversity will be important dimensions of future psychological
contracts.
In Chap. 8, based on web-based survey data, Løkke and Wunderlich
examine the use of high-performance work systems (HPWS) practices
among HR managers in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in the later
stages of the lockdown. They categorize the HPWS practices into three
dimensions (ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-­
enhancing HR practices) that are important for business continuation in
times of crisis.
In Chap. 9, combining the notions of geographical and cognitive dis-
tance and the paradox perspective, Bergum and Haukåsen employ data
 1 Introduction 9

from interviews, focus groups, observations, and documents to highlight

how tensions between distributed HR advisors affect their innovative
capability in an abrupt and comprehensive change process in a Norwegian
hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Chap. 10, in their literature review, the Portuguese scholars Tomé
and Costa compare three situations: the ‘old normal,’ the ‘new normal,’
and the ‘renewed normal,’ regarding four aspects of human resource
development and within virtual development relations, namely: work
environment, competences, training, and skills.
Onboarding during COVID-19 pandemic also poses some managerial
issues. In Chap. 11, the Italian scholars Russo, Morandin, and Manca
review the literature on the primary challenges faced by organization
regarding the online onboarding process, which is illustrated by some
practices that companies have used, including social onboarding, gamifi-
cation, and the use of collaborative tasks and tools. They explore the
objectives of the onboarding process and the main challenges experienced
by the newcomers that are onboarded during the pandemic. Issues such
as social isolation, learning opportunities, and trust development are
raised and addressed.
In Chap. 12, Haave, Kaloudis, and Vold also address the onboarding,
but here from a knowledge management perspective. Using a qualitative
approach, they interviewed newcomers in a Norwegian public organiza-
tion to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the
onboarding process. In addition, they examine the participants’ perspec-
tive of a desired ‘new normal’ when it comes to onboarding within their
organization.
In Chap. 13, Edelbroek, Coun, Peters, and Blomme present a longitu-
dinal quantitative study conducted in the Netherlands and Belgium to
draw lessons from employees’ experiences with leadership during the
COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, starting from a mutual-gains
perspective, they investigate the mediating role of work-related flow in
the relationships between empowering and directive leadership, on the
one hand, and innovative work-behaviour and work-family balance, on
the other.
The third part of this book is entitled “Reflections on Outcomes of
Remote Working” and focuses on outcomes of the new way of working
10 S. Bergum et al.

during the COVID-19 pandemic for managers and employees, particu-

larly on issues such as safety, general well-being, work-life balance, and
work-family boundary management.
Chapter 14 by Vartiainen opens this part by presenting results of a
survey study examining what kinds of challenges and opportunities were
perceived by Finish teleworkers in a leadership position and employees
during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when everyone was
forced to work from home, and what can be learned from these experi-
ences for the future. The theory on virtual teams and leadership, as well
as on the quality of relationships between teleworkers (encompassing
issues such as trust, socialization, work life balance, and frequency of
interaction) has been used to explain the findings.
Chapter 15 by Suomi and Somerkoski from Finland presents a frame-
work to understand new security issues in remote work. More specifically,
they explore data security and privacy, physical safety, and mental well-­
being issues, which are of vital importance for both organizations and
employees but are not always paid enough attention to in times of crisis.
They draw upon theory on data security and data privacy issues involving
private devices, storage issues, security regarding communication and
networks, and access to help desk services. Also, they focus on the physi-
cal safety regarding working from home, such as ergonomically issues and
injuries, and mental well-being due to social isolation, including how
autonomy and self-leadership affect productivity and work engagement.
Chapter 16 by Ollier-Malaterre from Canada addresses trends in orga-
nizations that rather enhance management control. She focuses on active
regulation of technology and its implications at work and outside of work
that have become an integral part of work in many occupations. She
argues that the management of work in the “new normal” should include
considering how to deal with three major issues: (a) constant connectiv-
ity, (b) self-presentation, and (c) privacy.
In Chap. 17, Pagliari from the UK and Tursunbayeva from Italy
explore how organizations can organize a safe ‘return to work’ by intro-
ducing a ‘COVID-19 vaccine passport.’ More specifically, they examine
sociotechnical considerations for HR professionals managing new
demands by pointing to important issues such as employment rights,
privacy, and ethical issues. Using discourse analysis and articles written by
 1 Introduction 11

HR professionals available on LinkedIn and Google, they present a con-

textual analysis of the adoption of innovations—such as the implementa-
tion of COVID-19 passports—focussing on technology, organization,
environment, and task/processes, tied to the utilization of the innovation.
In Chap. 18, Van Engen, Peters, and Van de Water present a quantita-
tive study among Dutch employees to investigate the relationship between
perceived lockdown intensity and work engagement, the mediating role
of work-family conflict (work-family and family-work conflict), and the
moderating role of family supportive supervisor behaviour during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Perceived lockdown intensity refers to employees’
negative feelings and experiences resulting from national and organiza-
tional COVID-19 regulations, hindering their perceived ability, motiva-
tion, and opportunity (AMO) to perform their work. They argue that
perceived lockdown intensity can enhance work-family conflict and
hence, reduce work engagement. Therefore, they also examine whether
leaders’ attention paid to employees’ work-family situation can mitigate
these negative outcomes associated with the COVID-19 lockdown.
In Chap. 19, based on an interview study conducted before the
COVID-19 pandemic with 20 public and private sector managers in
Sweden, Mellner explores perceptions on leadership in telework and
experiences of managers’ own and their employees’ management of work-­
nonwork boundaries. More specifically, using reflexive thematic analysis,
the role of authentic leadership is shown to play an important role in
managing telework situations.
In the final chapter, the epilogue, Bergum, Peters, and Vold summarize
and reflect on the chapters in this book in the light of the increasingly
loud call for purpose, ‘sustainability,’ inclusiveness, and responsibility in
strategic HRM and leadership, whereby attention is drawn to human and
social aspects of work and organization, such as health, motivation, based
on a broader, inclusive long-term objective, with respect for all labor mar-
ket parties’ career potential (Aust et al., 2020; Booysen, 2021; De Prins
et al., 2015; Van Ingen et al., 2021).
The chapters introduced above present us with a comprehensive pic-
ture of different issues concerning organization, HRM, and leadership
before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic and their conse-
quences for people in organizations. Moreover, they also provide leads for
12 S. Bergum et al.

organizations and organizing the ‘afterlife’ of the pandemic. The ‘new

normal’ will be affected by what has been experienced and will be experi-
enced in the future and how the use of technology has put an imprint on
the future of work. Hopefully, this book will be able to contribute towards
insights for making decisions for the ‘new normal.’ We hope you enjoy
the knowledge and the thought-provoking insights presented in the fol-
lowing chapters!

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 Part I
Reflections on Remote Working in
the Past and Future and the Impact
on the Organizational Level:
Remote Working Pre-Pandemic and
Post-Pandemic
 2
Three Organizational Perspectives
on the Adoption of Telework
Tor Helge Pedersen and Svein Bergum

Introduction
Even though telework is often carried out at alternative locations to the
central workplace, telework happens within organizational structures,
with their geographical and organizational distribution of units, tasks,
functions, responsibilities, rules, roles and people. Key terms defining
telework or virtual work are geographic dispersion (e.g. home offices) and
a dependence on technology in the work-related interaction between
employees (e.g. Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Raghuram et al., 2019). In the
context of telework, virtual leadership can be understood as having sub-
ordinate employees working at workplaces other than where the leader is
located (Bergum, 2009). The interest in teleworking was sparked in the
1970s (e.g. Nilles et al., 1976), and is still seen as a rapidly growing work-
ing arrangement, which “warrants greater research attention” (De Vries
et al., 2019, p. 588). For example, there is still a growing literature on

T. H. Pedersen (*) • S. Bergum

Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, Norway
e-mail: Tor.helge.pedersen@inn.no; Svein.bergum@inn.no

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 17

S. Bergum et al. (eds.), Virtual Management and the New Normal,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06813-3_2
18 T. H. Pedersen and S. Bergum

telework in relation to its benefits and challenges (Baruch, 2001; De

Vries et al., 2019; Donnelly & Proctor-Thomson, 2015; other contribu-
tions in this volume). However, less literature has paid attention to the
organizational theoretical perspectives that can help to understand orga-
nizational responses to telework and virtual management. For example,
over the past 20–30 years, many public sector organizations have adopted
organizational forms that include multi-located organizational units, in
which leaders and part of their subordinates’ work in different geographi-
cal locations. Such units may be seen as one of several forms of telework
and distance leadership (virtual management). Telework can therefore
take different forms, and these forms are not mutually exclusive:

1. Multi-located units (e.g. new organizational model)

2. Telework by choice (the telework option)
3. Enforced telework (the COVID-19 practice)

The first form is a multi-located unit. As mentioned, multi-located

units are units with work activities in several locations, and where a leader
may have his/her primary workplace in another location than his subor-
dinates. These units may be adopted with telework as a goal in itself, but
also as a consequence of other organizational changes (Bergum,
2009, p. 12).
The second form or category is telework by choice, which had already
been introduced by many organizations before 2020 (Caillier, 2012). It
was more recently studied as an innovation in the public sector context
that “offers a fundamental change to existing work practices and is
intended to change the organization” (De Vries et al., 2017, p. 271), and
that can “improve the working conditions of public servants” (De Vries
et al., 2019).
The third form is “enforced telework” in connection with natural
disasters or the COVID-19 lockdown of workplaces and consequently
work in home offices (e.g. Anderson & Kelliher, 2020; Donnelly &
Proctor-Thomson, 2015), but which is not necessarily intended to change
the organization. Whereas a leader or employees in a multi-sited unit
may have colleagues at his/her workplace, the teleworker in a home office
is normally alone.
 2 Three Organizational Perspectives on the Adoption of Telework 19

This chapter focuses on multi-located units and enforced telework. It

presents and discusses three influential organizational perspectives (the
technological, the performance gap and the institutional perspective) in
relation to changes in telework adoption before, during and after the
COVID-19 lockdowns of physical workplaces. Therefore, the purpose of
this chapter is to contribute to the discussion on telework adoption by
illustrating and discussing three organizational perspectives to changes
related to telework, and especially on how these can help understand the
emergence of a “new normal” (Nilles, 2022; Vyas, 2022), or widely
accepted prescription after the pandemic. More precisely, the contribu-
tion is to extract factors from the perspectives that may affect the pre-
scribed hybrid telework solutions (the mix of home-based and office-based
work) among the same type of organizations. The accepted prescription
may vary from sector to sector, for example, it may vary between health
care and higher education.
The chapter is organized as follows: In Section “Three Organizational
Perspectives”, three perspectives are outlined that have been used in
research on technology and organization, and that represent examples of
the rational and institutional tradition in organization’s research. These
perspectives represent different lenses on continuity (no change or slow
change) and change, and they highlight different drivers of change (e.g.
technology and institutional pressure), for example, related to telework
and virtual management. These perspectives are not used here to analyse
rich empirical material, but rather to illustrate lenses that help to under-
stand organizational changes in relation to telework before, during and
after the COVID-19 pandemic. Section “Teleworking in Multi-Located
Units (Pre-2020)” illustrates how these theoretical perspectives help us to
understand how organizations can adopt multi-located units. In many
cases, these units are based on virtual leadership. Finally, before conclud-
ing, Section “Understanding Telework in the Lockdown and Post-­
COVID-­19 Period” discusses how these perspectives help us understand
the lockdown and emergence of a “new normal” in different sectors in the
post-COVID period. The chapter is limited to factors extracted from the
three perspectives.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
115
Conn. Col. Rec. (1665–78), pp. 260, 334, 335, 339–43, 578–
86. N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 254.
Governor Dongan’s jealousy of Andros makes his statement
of Andros’s intentions ten years before questionable authority,
especially when it is remembered that at the time he made the
statement he was busily engaged in trying to persuade the
people of Connecticut to ask to be annexed to New York,
rather than to Massachusetts under Andros. Under these
circumstances, one cannot help suspecting his testimony as to
memoranda left behind by Andros, who was one of the most
cautious and methodical of men. N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 415. If
Andros intended to surprise the post, he certainly was very ill-
judged to send notice of his claim beforehand. For the best
account of these proceedings, see Brodhead, Hist. of N. Y., ii.
284–286.
116
Brodhead, Hist. of New York, ii. 303–306. New Jersey
Archives, i. 156–347.
117
Conn. Col. Records (1678–89), 283–285.
118
Mass. Rec., iv. (2), 359–361. Brodhead, History of New York, ii.
127.
119
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 257 ff.
120
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 254, 258, 259, 266, 267. See also
Randolph’s report in the same vol. 242. Hutchinson, Coll., 476,
490. Brodhead, ii. 290. Mather’s Brief History of the War, 117,
129, 254.
121
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 264, 265.
122
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 235, 256.
123
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 260–265.
124
N. Y. Col. Doc., 279–284, 302–308. For Andros’s answer, 308–
313.
125
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 314–316.
126
Duncan, 589. N. Y. Col. Doc., ii. 741. Hutchinson, Coll., 542.
127
Whitmore, Andros Tracts, I. xlix., Note D. “In an old pedigree
written about A. D. 1687 by Charles Andros uncle of the
governor, and still preserved in the family, we find:
‘The 13th April 1683, the King, Charles II. gave the charge of
Gentleman in ordinary of his privy chamber’ to Sir Edmund,
and ‘the 6th day of the month of June 1685, the King, James II.
gave a Commission to the above Sir Edmund Andros to
command a troop of Cavalry to go against the rebels in
England.’ This refers of course to Monmouth’s Rebellion. ‘In
August, 1685, he was made Lieut.-Colonel of Lord Scarsdale’s
cavalry.’”
128
Palfrey, Hist. of New England, iii. 319, 334. In 1678, Andros
had written Blathwayt that there would be danger of Indian
difficulties, “so long as each petty colony hath or assumes
absolute power of peace and war, which cannot be managed
by such popular governments as was evident in the late Indian
wars in New England.” N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 271. Earlier still,
Gov. Winslow of Plymouth had told Randolph that New
England could never flourish until its several colonies were
placed under his Majesty’s immediate government
(Hutchinson, Coll., p. 509), and Randolph had urged the matter
upon the council in his celebrated report. Hutch., Coll., 477–
503.
129
Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 4th Series, vol. ii.
130
Rhode Island Col. Records, iii. 175–197. Chalmers, Political
Annals, 278.
131
Whitmore, I. xxvii. Cambridge Almanac, 1687.
132
Whitmore, I. xxvii. Goldwin Smith, in his recent work on The
United States, seems to suppose that this occurred in New
 Hampshire.
133
Conn. Col. Records (1678–89), 376–378.
134
Conn. Col. Records (1678–89), 389.
135
Chalmers, Political Annals, 297, 298. General History of
Connecticut, by a Gentleman of the Province (Rev. S. Peters,
D. D.), London, 1781.
Peters’s account is as follows: “They resigned it (the charter)
in propria forma, into the hands of Sir Edmund Andros at
Hertford, in October, 1687, and were annexed to the Mass.
Bay colony, in preference to New York, according to royal
promise and their own petition. But the very night of the
surrender of it, Samuel Wadsworth of Hertford, with the
assistance of a mob, violently broke into the apartments of Sir
Edmund, regained, carried off and hid the charter in the hollow
of an elm, and in 1689, news arriving of an insurrection and
overthrow of Andros at Boston, Robert Treat, who had been
elected in 1687, was declared by the mob still to be Governor
of Connecticut. He daringly summoned his old Assembly, who
being convened, voted the charter to be valid in law, and that it
could not be vacated by any power, without the consent of the
General Assembly. They then voted, that Samuel Wadsworth
should bring forth the charter; which he did in a solemn
procession, attended by the High Sheriff, and delivered it to the
Governor. The General Assembly voted their thanks to
Wadsworth, and twenty shillings as a reward for stealing and
hiding their charter in an elm.”
136
Conn. Col. Rec. (1678–89), 248.
137
Bulkeley, Gershom, Will and Doom, in Conn. Col. Rec. (1678–
89), 390, 391.
138
Conn. Col. Rec. (1678–89), 393 note, 404 note.
139
Trumbull, History of Connecticut, i. 371–375.
140
For Andros’s own account of the transaction, see N. Y. Col.
Doc., iii. 722–726. Andros Tracts, iii. 20, 21. R. I. Col. Rec., iii.
281.
141
It is interesting to notice in this regard, that the chief complaint
Increase Mather made against Andros, in his interview with
James II., was that he did not sufficiently observe the king’s
Declaration of Indulgence. Mather, Cotton, D. D., Life of
Increase Mather, p. 41, London 1725. Parentator, pp. 109–116
(reprinted in part in Andros Tracts, iii. 121–187). Cf. Randolph’s
account in N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 578; also, Chalmers, Pol. Annals,
426.
142
Whitmore. Andros Tracts, i. 1–10. Hutchinson, i. 374–377.
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 722, 726. Palfrey, History of New England,
iii. ch. xiv., xv. That the revolution was carefully prepared and
planned, see Mather, Samuel, Life of Cotton Mather, p. 42, and
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 587, 588 (Deposition of Philip French), New
York, 1689.
“The above said Mr. Philip French further declared that being
on board the ‘Prudent Sarah,’ Benjamin Gillem Mastr coming
from England in company with Sir Willm Fips. heard him speak
severall times the words following to this effect, ‘that he did say
the first fishing boat he mett he would hire and goe privately
ashore and rise a company without beating of drum, and that
he would take the packets sent to Sr Edmund and not deliver
them to him, except he appeared in Councill, and there would
secure him.’
“That about the same time upon the said voyage he heard Sr
Willm Fips say that he appeared before the Lords, and one of
them starting up asked him whether they would stand by the
rights of their Charter, or for the abuses they had received from
Sir Edmund Andros; it was answered, by the right of their
charter.
“And about the same time this Deponant heard him say, that
they (which this Deponant supposes were the Lords or the
 Cômons assembled in Parliament) told him, that if they did
give them trouble to hang Sir Edmund, they deserved noe
funds.”
143
Conn. Col. Rec. (1678–89), 250, 455–460.
144
N. Y. Col. Doc., iii. 723. Whitmore, Andros Tracts, iii. 22, 23,
41–43 (for his escape and capture, 95–102).
145
Hutchinson, i. 394.
146
Beverly, History of Virginia, i. 37. C. W. (Charles Wolley), A. M.,
A Two Years’ Journal in New York. For an unfavorable
account, Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., v. 124–166, “An Account of the
Present State and Government of Virginia.” The Sainsbury
Papers, in the State Library at Richmond, Va., are transcripts
and abstracts from the London originals, of all official papers of
this period, relating to Virginia, and an examination of them
made in 1892, through the kindness of the State Librarian,
gave strong corroboration of the view of Andros’s
administration presented by Wolley and Beverly, and
presented Blair and his friends in a less amiable light than they
have presented themselves. Cf. Meade, Old Churches and
Families of Virginia, i. 107, 108. Perry, History of the American
Episcopal Church, vol. i. chapter vii.
147
Perry, Historical Collections of the American Colonial Church:
Virginia.
148
Whitmore, I. xxxiv. Duncan, 130, 131, 589. “In 1704, under
Queen Anne, he was extraordinarily distinguished by having
the lieutenant-governorship of Guernsey bestowed on him,
whilst he also continued bailiff, his duties, as such, being
dispensed with for the time, he having power given to him to
appoint his lieutenant-bailiff, who was likewise authorized to
name a deputy.”
149
Whitmore, I. xxxv.
150
Duncan, 589. “Sir Edmund was for many years at the head of
a mixed and adventurous population, in newly settled and
important colonies, distant from the mother country, a station at
all time arduous, but immeasurably so in the age of revolutions
in which he lived, when the institutions longest established
were not exempt from the common jeopardy, and unusual
energy was called for in all, wherever situated, by whom the
royal authority was to be asserted. He resolutely encountered
the duties and responsibilities of his high office throughout the
long course of his career, and was successful in resisting, in
his military as well as in his civil capacity, the intrigues and
hostilities of the neighboring French and Indians, to which he
was continually exposed. By some of the chroniclers of the
period, who wrote, doubtless, not uninfluenced by its
partisanship, he has been represented, in his earlier
government under James the Second, as an abettor of
tyranny; but by others of them, appearing to have possessed
the best means of judging of the circumstances under which
he acted, his conduct has been liberally estimated. His later
administration, under William the Third, is allowed to have
been irreproachable. All the colonies advanced greatly in
improvement whilst under his charge; and the fact that he was
distinguished by the marked approval and successive
appointments of his several sovereigns, after, no less than
before, the Revolution, cannot but be interpreted as the
strongest testimonial in his favor, and highly to the honor of his
reputation.”
Chalmers remarks (Political Annals, i. 422): “The charges of
greatest magnitude were not the faults of the governor, but of
the constitution; the smaller accusations arose from actions
directly contrary to his instructions. Did he act contrary to them
and to his commission, he had been the most faithless of
servants, and most criminal of men. But he did not. For, when
the agents of the province impeached him before William, they
accused him not of acting inconsistent with either, but of
having exercised an authority unconstitutional and tyrannous.
 His conduct was approved of by James; and he was again
appointed a colonial governor by William, because he equally
appeared to him worthy of trust. Unhappily oppressed by a real
tyranny, the colonists of those days beheld every action with
diseased eyes, and their distempers have descended in a
great measure to their historians, who have retailed political
fictions as indubitable truths.” And again: “What a spectacle
does the administration of Andros hold up to mankind for their
instruction; under a form of government, plainly arbitrary and
tyrannous, more real liberty was actually enjoyed than under
the boasted system, which appeared so fair.”
151
Doc. Hist. of N. Y., i. 179.
 IV.
THE LOYALISTS.

The opportunity of uniting together the colonies was lost when

the government of England, under William and Mary, condoned the
rebellion in Massachusetts, and allowed Connecticut and Rhode
Island to resume their charters. From that time onward, union under
the royal authority was impossible, even in the face of the pressing
dangers of the French and Indian wars, to which for over sixty years
the colonies were almost continuously exposed. Futile attempts were
made, but in face of such a triumph of individualism nothing could be
accomplished. When the conference at Albany, in 1754, put forth a
plan of federation, drawn up by Benjamin Franklin and studiously
moderate in its provisions, it was rejected with indignation by the
colonies, as tending to servitude, and by the authorities in England,
152
as incurably democratic. Yet the attempt that had been made
had, at least, one result: it had created what we may call an imperial
party, the members of which were devotedly attached to the
connection with Great Britain, and opposed to that narrow spirit so
prevalent in the colonies, which esteemed nothing as of value in
comparison with their local customs and local privileges. This party
grew strong in New York, where the extravagances of Leisler’s
insurrection had called for stern chastisement, and was also well
represented in New England. The new charter of Massachusetts,
which gave it a governor appointed by the crown, while preserving its
Assembly and its town organizations, had tended to encourage and
develop, even in that fierce democracy, those elements of a
conservative party which had been called into existence some years
before by the disloyalty and tyranny of the ecclesiastical oligarchy.
Thus, side by side with a group of men who were constantly
regretting their lost autonomy, and looking with suspicion and
prejudice at every action of the royal authorities, there arose this
other group of those who constantly dwelt upon, and frequently
exaggerated, the advantages they derived from their connection with
the mother country. In Connecticut there was a strong minority that
had opposed the re-assumption of the charter after the overthrow of
Andros; and in all the royal provinces an official class was gradually
growing up, that was naturally imperial rather than local in its
sympathies. The Church of England, also, had at last waked up to a
sense of the spiritual needs of its children beyond the seas, and by
means of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was sending
devoted and self-sacrificing missionaries to labor among the people
153
of the colonies. The influence of this tended inevitably to maintain
and strengthen the feeling of national unity in those of the colonists
who came under the ministrations of the missionaries. In the colony
of Connecticut, especial strength was given to this movement by an
unexpected religious revolution, in which several of the prominent
ministers of the ruling congregational body, and many of the best of
the laity, forsook their separatist principles and returned to the
154
historic church of the old home. The wars with the French, in
which colonists fought side by side with regulars, in a contest of
national significance, tended upon the whole to intensify the sense of
imperial unity; although there can be no doubt that the British officers
generally, by their contemptuous speeches and by their insolent
manner towards the colonials whom they affected to despise,
prepared the way for the eventual rupture of sentiment between the
155
colonies and England.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that neither navigation laws
nor the Stamp Act nor parliamentary interference had as much to do
in alienating the affections of Americans from the mother country, as
had the ill-mannered impertinence of the British officers and the royal
officials. This insolence, when joined to Grenville’s bungling and
exasperating attempt to extend imperial taxation to the colonies, had
the result of uniting for a time nearly all Americans in opposition to
the measures proposed by the advisers of the king, and enabled
them to win a great constitutional victory over the attempt to impose
stamp duties upon them. The division into two distinct parties,
though as has been pointed out the groups had been gradually
forming and drawing apart from one another, did not really come into
definite existence until the further impolitic measures of successive
ministries had strengthened the hands of those who were
traditionally disposed to resist the authority of England.
It is very hard for us to put ourselves in the place of men of a
century ago, and to think their thoughts and surround ourselves in
imagination with their environment; we naturally carry back much of
the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. We know the America of
to-day, a vigorous, healthy, prosperous, mighty nation, reaching from
sea to sea, filled with a busy people, adorned with the achievements
of a hundred years, hallowed by many sacred memories. The
American flag has floated proudly through the smoke of battle in
every quarter of the world, and for a hundred years men have seen
in it the symbol of a country and a fatherland. It is difficult for us to
realize that, before 1776, these influences had no power; there was
then no nation, no country, no fatherland, no flag, nothing but a
number of not over-prosperous colonies, with but little love or liking
for one another. Even the strongest Americans did not venture to use
the word nation or its derivatives, but called their congress, even
after the formal separation from England, simply the Continental
Congress. The very considerations which show us how wonderful
and even sublime were the faith and the devotion of the leaders of
the American revolution, will also show us how natural it was, how
almost inevitable it was, that other men, whose connection with
England was closer and more intimate, whose habits of mind were
conservative rather than progressive, who had been brought up to
fear God and honor the king and to think more about their duties
than about their rights, should cling with devotion to the cause of the
mother-country and condemn the revolution as a “parricidal
rebellion.”
Besides this highest motive, which influenced the best and the
purest-minded among the opponents of colonial separation, there
were undoubtedly other motives of lower character, which affected
some men in their decision, and disposed them to loyalty. The
political power of all the colonies had been largely in the hands of
those who were known as the “better sort,” usually gentlemen of
good family, rich and well educated; in some of the colonies official
position had been treated as the special prerogative of a few
distinguished families who contended with one another for its
possession: none of the colonies, not even Connecticut, was
democratic as we understand the term to-day. In some cases the
revolutionary movements and impulses came from a class which
wished to occupy public positions from which they had been
excluded, and in others from dissatisfied and discontented men of
birth and family, who were tired of being out in the cold, while their
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rivals were enjoying the pleasures and emoluments of office.
Thus in New York, the history of the revolution is closely bound up
with the family feuds of the De Lanceys on the one side with the
Livingstons on the other. In Massachusetts, the quarrel between
Governor Bernard and the Otises did much to increase the patriotism
of the latter family; and until the very breaking out of hostilities, the
contest within the colony was between a majority of the well-to-do
merchants and lawyers of Boston on the one side, and the least
stable elements of the populace, under the leadership of one of the
most skilful of political agitators, Samuel Adams, upon the other.
There is no doubt that, in Massachusetts at least, most well-to-
do persons considered the agitation at first to be merely political, the
usual device of the “outs” against the “ins”; they laughed at the loud
talk of some of the orators, and considered that it was put on for
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effect. When, in addition to this, the cause of American rights was
disgraced, year after year, by riots, murder, arson, and sedition,
those who were entrusted with the responsibilities of office, however
much they sympathized with the abstract principles that were upheld
by the popular leaders, were prejudiced against the concrete
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application of them. We should also remember that, down to the
time of the battle of Bunker Hill, if not later, all parties united in the
most loyal and devoted language. The rights that were claimed were
not the rights of Man, but of “natural-born subjects of the king of
Great Britain”; the king was always described as “the best and most
generous of monarchs,” and separation was never mentioned as a
possibility in any public utterance. War was looked forward to by
some of the most eager as a means of bringing the ministry to terms,
or as an unavoidable necessity if the unconstitutional taxation was
persisted in; but, up to the very last, most men agreed with Richard
Henry Lee, who said to Adams, as they parted after the first
Continental Congress in 1774: “All offensive acts will be repealed—
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Britain will give up her foolish project.”
When the most ardent American patriots used this language,
and used it sincerely, it is not remarkable that those who formed the
opposing political party, who were conservative when these were the
radicals, should have felt that they were bound by their duty to their
king and country, or that they should also have felt that the disorderly
actions and the factious attitude of some of the extreme patriots in
Massachusetts and elsewhere were simply seditious. These
convictions were undoubtedly strengthened by the abominable
treatment which many of them personally received. They were not
apt to look with greater favor upon a cause whose votaries had tried
to recommend it to their liking by breaking their windows, plundering
their houses, constantly insulting them, their wives and their
daughters, to say nothing of tarring and feathering them, or of
burning them in effigy. The penal measures imposed by the
Parliament upon the town of Boston and the colony of
Massachusetts had been brought upon themselves by the so-called
patriots. One rather wonders at the slowness and mildness of the
British government, and at their miserable inefficiency, than at any
repressive measures that they undertook. They deserved to lose the
colonies for their invincible stupidity, which led them from one
blunder into another; they irritated when they ought either to have
crushed or conciliated; they tried half-measures when vigorous
action was necessary; they persisted in affronting all the other
colonies while they failed in chastising sedition in Massachusetts.
The result was that they drove many men, who were loyal subjects
of Great Britain in 1774, into revolution in 1776, while they allowed
the rebels of Massachusetts to wreak vengeance at their will upon
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those who had been faithful in their allegiance to their king.
Besides those who were loyalists from conviction and
temperament and those who were almost unavoidably so from the
political position they occupied, there were also men who were
loyalists from the profit it gave them. Such were the holders of the
minor offices in the gift of the royal governors, the rich merchants
who represented English trading-houses, and dreaded war and
disturbance. There were others whose chief desire was to be upon
the winning side, who were unable to conceive the possibility of the
defeat of the English government by a handful of insurgent colonists,
and some also who, from local or personal dislikes or prejudices, or
from love of opposition, took a different side from that which was
taken by their neighbors. It is probable, however, that there were
hardly any whose motives were not to some extent mixed; few on
the one hand so disinterested or so devoted as not to be moved in
some degree by self-interest or prejudice, few on the other hand
whose nature was so biassed by prejudice or so sordid with love of
place or pension as not also to be moved by the higher impulse of
fidelity.
Loyalty is hard to define; it is one of those virtues which appeals
not so much to the head as to the heart. Its critics accuse it of being
irrational and illogical, as being based upon sentiment rather than
upon conviction. Yet, in spite of logic and reason, or rather, on
account of its profounder logic and higher reason, loyalty will hold its
own, and strike an answering chord of admiration in the human heart
as long as men appreciate disinterested virtue. It may be classed
with the other unreasoned qualities that men yet esteem, with faith
and truth, honor and courage, decency and chastity. It may be a
man’s intellectual duty to follow the dictates of his understanding and
to act upon his temporary convictions, whatever pain the action cost;
nevertheless, the man whom we respect and follow is not the man
who is always changing, who is easily influenced by argument, but
the man who abides by certain fixed principles, and refuses to desert
them, unless it can be shown him that beyond all chance of mistake
they are wrong and misleading.
 It has been sometimes asserted that loyalty can only be felt
towards a personal ruler or a dynasty; such a restriction of the term
is entirely unfounded. It is, by its very derivation, devotion to that
which is legal and established. Legality and Loyalty are
etymologically the same. No one can doubt that there is a high and
noble devotion to right and justice which is as admirable and as
strong as a devotion to any person. It is a more refined sentiment
and appeals to a higher moral sense than does the simple fidelity to
a person, beautiful and touching though such devotion be. The
loyalty of men who, like the younger Verneys, espoused the side of
the Parliament in its struggle with Charles the First, was as true and
real a sentiment, though its character was impersonal, as was that of
the stout Sir Edmund, who, though “he liked not the quarrel,”
followed the king, because “he had eaten his bread too long to turn
against him in his necessity.” There could hardly be a finer example
of this loyalty to an idea than was shown by those Americans who
condemned the stupid errors of the king and his advisers, and
realized fully the danger to liberty in the system of government that
George the Third was attempting to carry out in England and in
America, and yet, in spite of all, remained patriotic subjects, not from
affection but from principle, trusting to constitutional methods to
overcome the evils which they felt as strongly as any of those who
made them a justification for revolution.
As has been shown, among those who adhered to the side of
the mother country in the revolution there were men of all kinds and
convictions. There were those who were loyal because they believed
in the legal right of the Parliament to tax the colonies, short-sighted
as the policy might be, and considered their duty and their allegiance
to be due to the united empire. There were those who adhered to the
king’s cause from personal devotion to him and to his dynasty, an
unreasonable devotion in the eyes of some, but certainly not as
contemptible as American satirists have loved to describe it. There
were those who were by nature conservatives, willing to do anything
sooner than change, governed completely by a prejudice which
hardly deserves the noble name of loyalty, but still had in it an
element of steadiness and sturdiness that redeems it from contempt.
There were also, undoubtedly, men who calculated the chances of
victory in the struggle and espoused the side that they thought was
likely to win; there were those who were for the king from pure
gregariousness, because some of their friends and neighbors were
on that side; and, finally, some who, from a mere love of opposition,
set themselves against the cause of America because their
neighbors and townsmen favored it.
And, as the motives which impelled men were different, so also
their actions differed when the rupture came between the king and
the colonies. Some were active favorers of the cause of the king,
doing whatever they could to assist it and to injure the cause of their
rebellious neighbors. Others sadly left their homes at the outbreak of
the war and took refuge in England or in some of the English
provinces, suffering want, anxiety, and despair, snubbed and
despised by the insular English, compelled to hear America and
Americans insulted, dragging along a miserable existence, like that
of the shades whom Virgil found upon the bank of the infernal river,
not allowed to return to earth or to enter either Elysium or Tartarus.
Others attempted to live in peaceful neutrality in America,
experiencing the usual fate of neutrals, animals like the bat neither
beast nor bird but plundered and persecuted by both. Such betook
themselves usually to the protection of the British arms, and were to
be found in the greatest numbers at or near the headquarters of the
British generals in Savannah or Charlestown, Newport or New York.
Some American writers have been extremely severe upon the
Americans who served in the royal armies; such condemnation is
certainly illogical and unjust. They were fighting, they might have
reasoned, to save their country from mob rule, from the dominion of
demagogues and traitors, and to preserve to it what, until then, all
had agreed to be the greatest of blessings—the connection with
Great Britain, the privilege and honor of being Englishmen, heirs of
all the free institutions which were embodied in the “great and
glorious constitution.”
If the loyalists of New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas reasoned
in this manner, we cannot blame them, unless we are ready to
maintain the proposition that the cause of every revolution is
necessarily so sacred that those who do not sympathize with it
should at least abstain from forcibly opposing it. The further charge
is made that the worst outrages of the war were committed by Tories,
and the ill-doings of Brant and Butler at Wyoming and Cherry Valley,
together with the raids of Tryon and Arnold, are held up to the
execration of posterity as being something exceptionally brutal and
cruel, unparalleled by any similar actions on the part of the Whig
militia or the regular forces of either army, Sullivan’s campaign
161
through the Indian country being conveniently forgotten. Impartial
history will not palliate the barbarities that were committed by either
party; but there can be no doubt that the Tory wrong-doings have
been grossly exaggerated, or at least have been dwelt upon as
dreadful scenes of depravity to form a background for the heroism
and fortitude of the patriotic party whose misdeeds are passed over
very lightly. The methods of the growth of popular mythology have
been the same in America as elsewhere; the gods of one party have
become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a
halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscuring
their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown
with the growth of years. But it is an undoubted fact that there were
outrages upon both sides, brutal officers on both sides, bad
treatment of prisoners on both sides, guerilla warfare with all its evil
concomitants on both sides, and in these respects the Tories were
no worse than the Whigs. There was not much to choose between a
Cowboy and a Skinner, very little difference between Major
Ferguson’s command and that of Marion and Sumter. There was no
more orderly or better-behaved troop in either army than Simcoe’s
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Queen’s Rangers; possibly there was none on either side as bad
as the mixture of Iroquois Indians and Tory half-breeds who were
concerned in the massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley.
The Americans, however, do not deserve any credit for
abstaining from the use of Indian allies. They tried very hard to make
use of them, but without success. A few Englishmen in the Mohawk
Valley, faithful to the traditions of just and honest treatment of the
Indians, which had been inherited from the Dutch, had succeeded in
making the Iroquois regard them as friends, but everywhere else the
Indian and the colonist were bitter and irreconcilable foes. The
savage had long scores of hatred to pay, not upon the English nation
or English army, but upon the American settlers who had stolen his
lands, shot his sons, and debauched his daughters. The employment
of the Mohawks by the English was an outrage and a crying shame
upon civilization; but the responsibility of it lies directly upon the
government which allowed it, and the commanding generals who
sanctioned the expeditions, and only indirectly upon the men who
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carried out the directions of their superiors. It is interesting to
remember in this connection that the courteous and chivalrous
Lafayette raised a troop of Indians to fight the British and the Tories,
though his reputation has been saved by the utter and almost
ludicrous failure of his attempt. The fact is that, as far as the
Americans were engaged in it, the war of the Revolution was a civil
war, in which the two sides were not far different in numbers or in
social condition, and very much the same in their manners and
customs. The loyalists contended all through the war that they were
in a numerical majority, and that if they had been properly supported
by the British forces and properly treated by the British generals, the
war could have been ended in 1777, before the French alliance had
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given new hopes and new strength to the separatist party.
Sabine, in his well-known work on the loyalists of the Revolution,
computes that there were at least twenty thousand Americans in the
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military service of the king at one time or another during the war.
Other authorities think this estimate too high, but the number was
extremely large. In New York and New Jersey it is probable that the
opponents of separation outnumbered the patriot party, and the
same is probably true of the Carolinas and Georgia. Even in New
England, the nursery of the Revolution, the number was large and so
formidable, in the opinion of the revolutionary leaders, that in order to
suppress them they established a reign of terror and anticipated the
famous “Law of the Suspected” of the French Revolution. An
irresponsible tyranny was established of town and country
committees at whose beck and call were the so-called “Sons of
Liberty.” To these committees was entrusted an absolute power over
the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens, and they proceeded on
principles of evidence that would have shocked and scandalized a
grand inquisitor.
Virginia and Maryland seem to have been the only provinces in
which the body of the people sympathized with the projects of the
revolutionary leaders. The few loyalists there were in Virginia retired
to England with the last royal governor, and in Maryland a strong
sense of local independence and local pride led the colony to act
with unanimity and moderation.
The rigorous measures adopted by the new governments in the
Eastern States, and the activity of their town committees, succeeded
in either driving out their loyalist citizens or reducing them to
harmless inefficiency. In New York and New Jersey, however, they
remained strong and active throughout the war; and as long as the
British forces held Georgia and the Carolinas, loyalty was in the
ascendant in those states.
The question will naturally be asked, why, if they were so
numerous, were they not more successful, why did they yield to
popular violence in New England and desert the country while the
contest was going on, why did they not hold the Southern States and
keep them from joining the others in the Continental Congresses and
in the war. In the first place, a negative attitude is necessarily an
inactive one; and in consequence of this and of the fact that they
could not take the initiative in any action, the loyalists were put at a
disadvantage before the much better organization of the patriotic
leaders. Though these were few in number, in the South they were of
the best families and of great social influence, and in the North they
were popular agitators of long experience. They manipulated the
committee system so carefully that the colonies found themselves,
before they were aware of the tendency of the actions of their
deputies, involved in proceedings of very questionable legality, such
as the boycotting agreement known as the American Association,
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and the other proceedings of the Continental Congress. When the
war began, the population of the three southernmost states had very
little care, except for their own lives and pockets. They were, with the
exception of a few distinguished families, descendants of a very low
grade of settlers. Oglethorpe’s philanthropy had left the legacy of
disorder and inefficiency to the colony of Georgia, a legacy which the
Empire State of the South has now nobly and grandly outlived. North
Carolina had a most heterogeneous population, and was, perhaps,
the most barbarous of all the colonies; while in South Carolina the
extremes in the social scale were most strongly marked, from the
high-spirited Huguenot gentlemen to the poor whites who formed the
bulk of the population, worse taught, worse fed, and worse clad than
the negro slaves. Such a population as this, living also in constant
fear of negro insurrection, was not likely to count for much on the
one side or the other; and we shall find, if we read Gates’s and
Greene’s dispatches on the one side, and Rawdon’s and
Cornwallis’s on the other, that the rival commanders agree in one
thing at least—in condemning and despising the worthlessness of
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the militia recruited in the southern country. It was the utter
cowardice of this militia that lost the battle of Camden and caused
the needless sacrifice of the lives of the braver Continentals; and the
correspondence of the English general is full of instances that prove
that, except for plundering and bushwhacking, there was little use to
be made of the loyalists in the South.
As to the other questions, why, when the loyalists were so
numerous, were they not more successful, and why did the eastern
loyalists yield to the violence that was offered them, one question
nearly answers the other. They were not successful, because they
had no leaders of their own stock and country, and because the
British commanders blundered throughout the war with as unerring
certainty and unfailing regularity as the various British ministries had
done from 1764 to 1776. The game was in the hands of the English,
if they had known how to play it, for the first three years of the war.
Then English inefficiency, rather than any belief in the ability of the
colonists to make good their own independence, brought about the
French alliance; and the war assumed from thenceforward a very
different aspect. The desertion of their cause and their country by the
many Tories who left New England for Great Britain or the loyal
provinces, and the supineness of the men of place and position who
attempted to preserve an attitude of neutrality instead of siding
openly either for or against the king, weakened the king’s cause in
America and prevented the numbers of the loyalist population from
counting for as much as they were really worth.
The clever French diplomatist who collected and translated the
correspondence of Lord George Germaine with the British generals
and admirals, a remarkably well-informed critic of the military
operations in America, states in his Preface his opinion as follows:
“Another thing which clearly proves that the affairs of the English
have been badly conducted in America, is that the American loyalists
alone were superior in number to the rebels. How, then, has it come
to pass that troops double in numbers, well paid and wanting
nothing, aided besides by a German army, have failed in opposing
the partisans of liberty, who, badly paid and badly equipped, often
lacked everything? Manifestly it is in the different capacity of the
commanders that we must seek for the counterweight which has
turned the scale in favor of the latter. If the English had had a
Washington at the head of their army there would long since have
been no more question of war on the American Continent.... M.
Linguet has said somewhere in his annals that the secretaries of the
Congress were better than the secretaries of the English generals.
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The same may be said of the generals themselves.”
Besides being inefficient in the field, the British commanders
alienated their friends and weakened the attachment of the loyalists
to the cause of the king by their extremely impolitic treatment of the
American provinces within their occupation. The regular officers
made no secret of their contempt for the colonists, and plundered
them without mercy, making little, if any, distinction between loyalist
or rebel, Tory or Whig. Judge Thomas Jones, a New Yorker of
prominence and position, who was a devoted loyalist and one of the
number especially singled out by name in the Act of Confiscation
and Attainder passed by his native state, has left us his record of the
way in which the British officers and officials exasperated rather than
conciliated the Americans, and punished rather than rewarded the
loyal for their attachment to the king and the integrity of the empire.
He writes: “In 1780, part of the army went into winter quarters upon
the westernmost end of the island, where they robbed, plundered,