Challenging new ways of working for managers in global collaborative work environments.

Paper in proceeding, 2011

Global teamwork, mobile work, and telework require new ways of organizing and managing work across several locations. Large corporate teams typically engage middle managers that report to their superiors and coordinate team member activities. This paper studies middle managers that are faced with new ways of working challenges driven by globalization and mobility and forced to engage in global collaborative work environments (CWE). As global managers they work in multiple teams having to play a dual role, on one hand managing global team members and on the other hand being team members in the management group that reports to their superior. We used multiple methods to collect case study data in two Fortune 100 high tech companies located in Europe and US. Our findings show that the organization policy implemented in the workplace and ICT infrastructure do not support global managers. Consequently, global managers are challenged to adapt their own work practices to new ways of working.