Visible from Afar: Remote Employees’ Collaboration Responsiveness to Managerial Requests

Amidst the ubiquity of remote work, this research examines the psychological stress and behavioral adaptations it engenders in employees, and the resultant managerial reactions. Integrating signaling theory with research on voluntary visibilizing, we propose that remote work triggers visibility anxiety, propelling employees to exhibit higher collaboration responsiveness towards managerial requests as a strategic attempt to augment their visibility. From the managerial perspective, we posit that managers trust employees exhibiting higher responsiveness more and thereby, give them higher performance evaluations and greater rewards. We obtained support for our theory through a multi-method empirical approach, which includes a natural field experiment in a technology firm using 1,098,750 objective collaboration records over an 18-week period from both experimental and control samples, and two pre-registered experiments and three scale-validation studies with working adults. Additionally, our research uncovers a less resource-intensive signalling strategy for remote employees, showing that promptly acknowledging managerial requests is nearly as effective as rapid task completion in building managerial trust. Our findings contribute to the burgeoning literature on remote work, elucidating the psychological mechanisms and behavioral dynamics for manager-employee collaborations in remote contexts, and offering novel practical implications for improving remote work relationships.